#5 Four Choices for America
In the concluding chapter, Hanson declares that Californians (and, thus, Americans) have essentially four choices in dealing with immigration. First we could "continue de facto open-borders" but insist upon assimilation. Second we could vastly reduce immigration and assume that assimilation will take care of itself. Third—Hanson’s choice—we could combine greatly reduced immigration (both legal and illegal) with vigorous patriotic assimilation.
The fourth path¾our present policy—would lead to "a true Mexifornia," an "apartheid state" that "even the universal solvent of popular culture could not unite." California would then combine the "worst attributes of both nations," an "American individualism shorn of both Anglo-Saxon-inspired allegiance to the letter of the law and traditional Mexican familial and religious bedrock values."
In this case, Hanson tells us, poverty becomes endemic; schools erode; crime soars; taxes increase; budget deficits explode; legal or illegal status becomes "irrelevant" for college tuition, driver’s licenses, welfare, and "perhaps soon even voting privileges." The assimilated upper and upper-middle classes of all races practice a "self-interested apartheid" while professing "selfless liberality." A new argot of Spanglish, the "dumbing-down of both languages," emerges among a large, unassimilated, constantly growing Latino underclass that dwarfs both the upper class and an assimilated and intermarried middle and working class.
Victor Davis Hanson, The Coming of Mexifornia
Hudson Institute, Thursday, August 21, 2003
Mexifornia Five Years Later. |