But if no such documentation is required of aliens, will we then allow all Californians to obtain licenses, the foundation of our security and identification, without proof of their birth and age? Or shall we insist on birth certificates only for legal California residents, and not for illegal aliens? Shall we make life easier for illegals who pose the greater danger on our roads, and more difficult for our own citizens who do not? One of the most fascinating aspects of the entire immigration fiasco is the unspoken logic of creating an alternate universe for the illegal alien, in which our long-honored rules and statutes do not apply - a separate code of frontier jurisprudence for millions who, ipso facto, have broken the old law by their unlawful entry into America.
We are entering a cynical time, when politicians deal with the flood of immigrants simply by envisioning them all as future voters and enacting bizarre legislation to win their gratitude. Or is the case more benign? Are we simply so flooded with aliens that any of the consistency or respect for past principle that is vital for the long-term health of the state is unfeasible in the short term?
The University of California and the CaliforniaStateUniversity system are inexpensive for resident California taxpayers, but not for out-of-staters. We have always tried to gouge nonresident citizens to subsidize the ridiculously low tuition we charge our own residents. Yet recently, this age-old two-tier system of payment was determined to be "prejudicial" to resident illegal aliens, whose families purportedly "paid taxes" to our state coffers. Forget about issues of legal status and the questionable degree to which undocumented workers are compensated through legal payroll systems rather than cash. And for a moment ignore also the understandable long-term and constructive strategies of giving reduced tuition to encourage greater use of the universities by Hispanic residents.
Consider instead once more the precedent set. American citizens from Arizona and Nevada who enroll in California schools now pay more than double what illegal aliens from Mexico pay for tuition. We are rigorous in determining an Oregonian's resident status for the purpose of charging him more for tuition, but lax in confirming the illegality of Mexican aliens in our haste to provide them with discount rates not available to most U.S. citizens. One out-of-state student at CaliforniaStateUniversity, Fresno, bitterly asked me, "If I renounce my American citizenship and reenter California illegally from Mexico, can I save $3,000 this year on fees?" I simply shrugged, unable to tell him that he was wrong.
Our local hospital emergency room serves almost exclusively His-panics. Among them are all sorts of patients with questionable legal status who turn up at the oddest hours to receive excellent medical care for everything from a twisted knee to leukemia. Not long ago, I took my son in for emergency stitches for an athletic injury and saw a drama involving the aftermath of street warfare that taught me something. I learned that the Mexican gang member may shoot and stab with abandon, but in the agony of his last hours he demands without appreciation or knowledge the technology of the twentieth-century American emergency room to rebuild his liver and stitch up his shredded kidneys.
The wounded vatos I saw that night might not know a pancreas from a lung, but they were secure in the assumption that the doctor - a four-eyed wimp of the type they habitually stare down on the street - knew both nephrology and pneumonology. In a sobbing aria of need, one of these gang-bangers shrieked, "Mom, mommy, main, main, they stabbed me!" His mother was herself screaming in Spanish for nurses, doctors and support staff for "mijo" as they peeled off his bloody gang shirt and his soiled, feces-stained baggy trousers - on his way into the antiseptic emergency room. The doctor worked with one eye on his patient and another on two antagonistic groups of rival gang family members in the waiting room - worried that a renewal of hostilities would break out in his hospital before the night's wounded were stitched up and sent back out to battle.
Equally bizarre is the American policy of granting instant citizenship at our hospitals to infants of illegal aliens. We see pregnant women with no cash, no husband, no English and no papers who rush to the local hospital at the last minute to bring forth a United States citizen. The birth is a miraculous event indeed, for in theory the infant instantaneously can anchor a new American existence for a full array of parents and assorted relatives of illegal status. How surreal! If an American executive and his upscale pregnant wife deliver a son at a corporate retreat in Cabo San Lucas, they are headed for mountains of paperwork and expenses. The Mexican government, of course, does not consider Joshua Evans III a Mexican citizen by virtue of the fact that he entered the world under Mexican skies. But even the American government presence in Mexico is suspicious and niggardly with its gifts of citizenship to the offspring of its own temporary expatriates, often demanding that lawyers present all sorts of documentation at the local consulate to prove the bona fides of the young American who had the misfortune of being delivered outside U.S. borders.
Like most Californians, I am confused by second-generation gang members even when they aren't getting
