MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 137

cal illiteracy.

My own elementary school is still two miles away, but whereas

forty years ago it turned out skilled and confident Americans, its

graduates who enter high school now have among the lowest lit-

eracy levels and the most dismal math skills in the state. The lucky

ones who eventually go on to college are likely to be among the 47

percent of students entering the California State University system

who need remedial classes�"the largest university in the world, and

nearly half the freshmen take high-school, not college, courses.

Yet for Hispanics, just reaching the remedial CSU programs

is a great achievement in itself. Despite millions in federal and state

expenditures in the last twenty years, by 1996 only 61 percent of

Hispanics�"both native and foreign-born�"had graduated from

high school. Nearly a decade later, out of every 100 Hispan-

ics�"native or foreign-born, illegal or lawful immigrants, citizens

or aliens�"who now enter California high schools, 30 wil drop out.

And of the remaining 70, fewer than 4 will matriculate prepared

for any serious college-level courses in mathematics. Less than 10

percent of all adult Mexican-Americans currently hold a bachelor’s

degree.

Some may argue over the data, wondering precisely who are

those listed as �śHispanic” on surveys and by what chronological

parameters a failure to graduate is measured. And new data in the

twenty-first century may shed a different light on all this. But what

is unarguable is that we are clearly faced with skyrocketing asym-

metries between Hispanic and non-Hispanic performance in our

schools�"a problem that has been apparent since the 1970s, when

hundreds of thousands of aliens began coming into this country

illegally and were adopted by the intellectual inheritors of the

prior decade’s political radicalism.

How then did we get to this present dilemma in California?

How did we arrive at a world where thousands of citizens have

lounged, embittered, on the dole while harvests go unpicked? How

did we ignore thousands here, but demand that thousands more