Do We Want Mexifornia?

Native Californian, Victor Davis Hanson, has some interesting thoughts on the matter here.  A few quotes:

To contrast the Selma I live in today with the Selma I grew up in will doubtless seem hopelessly nostalgic. But the point of the contrast is not that 40 years ago our community was only 40 or 50 percent Mexican, but rather that the immigrants then were mostly here legally. Crime was far rarer: the hit-and-run accidents, auto theft, drug manufacturing and sale, murders, rapes, and armed robberies that are now customary were then nearly nonexistent. Fights that now end in semi-automatic-weapon fire were settled with knives then.

I used to worry over the theft of a tractor battery. Yet in the last decade, I have run off at gunpoint three gang members trying to force their way into our house at 3 am. Last year, four patrol cars—accompanied by a helicopter whirling overhead—chased drug dealers in hot pursuit through our driveway. One suspect escaped and turned up two hours later hiding behind a hedge on our lawn, vainly seeking sanctuary from a sure prison term. When a carload of thieves tried to steal oranges from our yard, I soon found myself outmanned and outgunned—and decided that 100 pounds of pilfered fruit is not worth your life.
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Most of the kids I saw each day then—just as most of the adults I see daily now around the same farm—were from Mexico. Skin color and national origin were quite out in the open. We five Anglos in our class of 40 at our rural elementary school were labeled “white boys” and “gringos”; in turn, we knew the majority as “Mexicans,” their parents more respectfully as “Mexican-Americans.” Most fights, however, were not racial. We in the white minority fought beside and against Mexican-Americans; the great dividing line of most rumbles was whether you were born in Selma or Fresno. We had our fringe racists, of course: Mr. Martinez, the fourth-grade teacher, told me in 1963 that “whitey was through in California,” even as Mrs. Wilson, a Texas native, complimented those in the art class who were “lighter than most from Mexico.” There was nothing of the contemporary multicultural model—no bilingual aides, written and spoken communication with parents in Spanish, textbooks highlighting the Aztecs and the theft of northern Mexico, or federally funded counselors to remind students that “the borders crossed us, not we the borders.” Excused absences for catechism classes at the Catholic church emptied our classrooms, giving us five Anglo Protestants a much-welcomed three-hour recess. We all suffered fish sticks on Friday, the public school’s concession to the vast Catholic majority.
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I often think that if I did not particularly like my Mexican-American students (who make up the majority of my classics classes), and if I wanted them to fail, I would not continue to teach them Latin (much less Greek), English composition, or Western history and culture. Nor would I insist on essays free of grammatical error or demand oral reports that employ classical rhetorical tropes.

No, if I did not like them or did not wish to live among thousands of illegal and legal immigrants and wish them married into my family, I would keep them distant by teaching them therapy, letting them speak poor English—or no English at all—and insisting on the superiority of the Mexican culture that they or their parents had fled. If I did not like my students and wished them to remain in the fields—or when they were employed in the office to be snickered at behind closed doors by their white benefactors—I would move from the west side of Selma to an exclusive white suburb in north Fresno, and then as penance teach them during the day about the glory of the Aztecs, the need for government entitlement, and the idea that grammar is but a “construct.” I would insist that white racism and capitalist brutality alone explain Mexican-American crime rates, and I would explain why they need someone like me to champion their cause to the wealthy and educated. If I really wished to be distant from my students, I would insist that they attend our university’s separate Hispanic graduation assemblies to remind them that they are intrinsically different from, rather than inherently equal to me. I would be more like the sensitive teachers who teach today than the insensitive ones who once taught me.

So I have made my choice on the great question that California must decide: whether we will remain multiracial or become America’s first truly multicultural state. For our future, will we all return to an imperfect, insensitive, but honest assimilationist past that nevertheless worked, or stay with the utopian and deceitful multiculturalist present that is clearly failing? Unchecked illegal immigration and multiculturalism are a lethal mix. California—if it is to stay as California—might have coped with one or even the other, but surely not both at once.