MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 50

debate now going on about immigration, it seems to me vital that

critics of Mexican illegal aliens at least experimentâ€"if only for

forty-eight hours or soâ€"with working at such helotage. They

might serve as maids for a day at the Motel 6, or pick strawberries

to understand the issues of stoop labor, its compensation, and why

people who wish to work find in America work that Americans

will not do. We must keep in mind that unlike the 1950s, when

only the elite in our country had someone else tend their lawns and

baby-sit their kids, now millions of the middle and upper-middle

classes pay aliens for such servicesâ€"a radical change in the Ameri-

can lifestyle made possible by the arrival of millions from Mexico

in the last decades.

So at a personal level, whether the present massive immigra-

tion is good or bad sometimes depends on whether your lawn is

being mowed cheaply, or you are mowing someone else’s; whether

you show up at the emergency room for thousands of dollars in

free maternity care, or pay the highest state taxes in the country

to provide care for someone who either cannot or will not acquire

health insurance; whether you believe that we are all going to be

fine because an illegal alien becomes valedictorian of his high-

school class, or that none of us will have a future when almost four

out of every ten Hispanic studentsâ€"natives, resident aliens and

illegal immigrants alikeâ€"are believed never to finish the twelfth

grade.

As we contemplate this growing complexity, it is worth

considering the world as it appears to the illegal alienâ€"a cosmos

that I know something about as one who has worked in orchards

and vineyards side by side with farm workers for much of his life.

One thing this alien knows in his heart: There is a simple reason

why Americans do not do farm work, one that transcends even

the absence of real money and any status. It is physical y hard to pick

peaches al day. The twelve-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, espe-

cially when you must clamber up among the top branches sixty or

seventy times a day and then descend with fifty pounds of peaches