Far too generous on immigration
Federico de Jesus owes Victor David Hanson an apology.
De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal., falsely accused Hanson, the distinguished author of the just-published book “Mexifornia” (Encounter, 2003) of racism and xenophobia at a recent Capitol Hill briefing.
During his introduction, Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece, was aptly described as “a classicist.” De Jesus somehow interpreted that to mean that the author had a white “classist” bias against immigrants. Pelosi’s aide, who somehow earned a diploma without being able to make a distinction between a classicist and a classist, got ugly with Hanson and stormed out of the briefing in protest.
De Jesus’ hysterics reveal what kind of not-so-beautiful minds the House’s top Democrat has shaping her views on issues, which is troubling because there hardly is a more urgent issue facing America than immigration, particularly illegal immigration from Mexico. And Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, ought to know that better than most of her colleagues on the Hill. That’s because California is the state of choice for an estimated 40 percent of the nation’s legal and illegal immigrants, a disproportionate number of whom hail from south of the border.
While Mexican immigrants come to America no more or less poor, no more or less uneducated than previous waves of immigrants, they are far more resistant to assimilating into American culture. Hanson notes that, of the millions of Mexican immigrants legally admitted to this country since 1982, only 20 percent had bothered to become citizens by 1997.
A resistance to fully assimilating into American society and the de-emphasis of “American” in Mexican-American, has impeded the Mexican immigrant population’s upward mobility in California. That notion is borne out by data compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, the Washington-based public policy group headed by immigration expert Mark Krikorian. Some 65 percent of Mexican immigrants in California are high school dropouts, according to the center, compared to only 7 percent of the native-born population. Some 41 percent of Mexican immigrant households are on the public welfare rolls, compared to 14 percent of natives.
The reality is that second and third generation Mexican-Americans are barely better off than their forebears who immigrated to this country.
So why does America continue to allow the yearly influx of hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, not just legal, but also illegal? Because there are interests on both the right and left that favor this nation’s de facto open borders policy.
Conservative corporations, contractors and agribusiness demand cheap labor from Mexico, according to Hanson, no matter the social consequences. Meanwhile, so-called “progressive” academics, journalists, government bureaucrats and La Raza advocates see illegal immigrants as a vast new political constituency for those peddling the notion that victimhood, not citizenship, is the key to advancement.
The American public sees things different from both ideological camps.
Two-thirds believe the United States should set the goal of completely halting illegal immigration, according a Roper-ASW poll this past March. And nearly half say legal immigration levels should be decreased, according to a Gallup poll last month.
It’s not that two-thirds of Americans are racists, or that half are xenophobic. It’s just that they recognize that this nation, which admits more immigrants each year than any other, can no longer afford to be so overly magnanimous.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)