True, the two decades of Mexican revolution between 1910 and 1930 gave us one million new arrivals, and subsequently the rate has often been nearly fifty thousand per year. What is new is not so much the increased volume of immigration, but a growing despair and uncertainty over how - or even whether-----to assimilate
the arrivals into the fabric of the United States. In America's immigration dilemma, no state is more unsure of itself (or more broke) than California - and perhaps for just that reason no home is more sought out by illegal aliens.
Most arrivals are given work by grateful employers. Indeed, businesses profit greatly from the aliens' much-needed labor - even as the audacious newcomers are increasingly resented by millions of other Californians for coming in such numbers and under such unlawful circumstances. Although illegal aliens are eager to get a fighting chance to succeed in America, many are not prepped for, nor immersed into the cutthroat competitive culture they help to mobilize.
Instead, in recent years they and their offspring have ended up in ethnic enclaves of the mind and barrios of the flesh. In these locations they often soon become dependent on subsidies - and too many of their children will join an underclass to be led by ethnic shepherds who often do more harm than good, however much they wish to help.
Since roughly 1970, the evolving concept of multicultural-ism - which holds that Western civilization merits no special consideration inasmuch as all cultures are of equal merit - has proved to be the force-multiplier of illegal immigration from Mexico. It turns a stubborn problem of assimilation into a social tragedy stretching across generations. Almost every well-intended and enlightened gesture designed to help immigrants in the last three decades - de facto open borders, bilingual education, new state welfare programs, the affirmation of a hyphenated identity, a sweeping revisionism in southwestern American history - has either failed to ensure economic parity or thwarted the processes of assimilation. Almost everything stern and uncompromising that for two centuries has helped other immigrants to the United States - language immersion, autonomy from government assistance, rapid assumption of an American identity, and eager acceptance of mainstream American culture - has either been discounted as passé or embraced only halfheartedly.
The backward-looking new ideology about Mexican immigration is obsessed with the racial prejudice and economic exploitation of the past - a wound repeatedly scrutinized by comfortable elites, but clearly not much of a hindrance to the millions of impoverished Mexicans and Indians who still risk their lives daily to reach the promised land of America, apparently glad to escape the wretchedness of their native land.
When ethnic chauvinism is preached by our elites (who often do not really practice it themselves), it creates situations with real consequences. Brothers with Mexican surnames get scholarships, while their half-siblings with equivalent records but non-Latino names do not. Friends of four decades suddenly drift apart because one is made to feel that his commitment to assimilation is somehow retrograde or proof of false consciousness. Our sense of history, both national and familial, is stolen from us - a longsuffering grandmother born in 1890 who worked hard is no longer remembered as a unique individual, but is categorized along with millions of anonymous others as simply an agent of past oppression.
Most Califormans of all backgrounds understand these growing social and cultural costs that ultimately originate from their dependence on seemingly limitless cheap labor - the Devil's bargain we have made to avoid cutting our own lawns, watching our own kids, picking our peaches, laying our tile and cleaning our toilets. But despite the benefits that flow from the bargain, they are still ill at ease for having made it, although, because of fears that they will be disparaged as illiberal, they seldom voice openly what they feel. This situation led to successful ballot initiatives that cut off aid to illegals, ended affirmative action and curtailed bilingual education. And in the depressing circularity of the immigration dilemma, these referenda made sure that the subject was even more repressed - the third rail of California politics. It is often a war between street protest and simmering anger in the voting booth. Mexicans march to demand that Fresno's century-old and historic Kings Canyon Avenue - with a direct view of the majestic peaks - instantaneously become "Caesar Chavez Avenue." In response, furious Anglo voters make anonymous calls to talk shows and promise revenge in November. The Mexican-American caucus in the legislature demands that state universities, by fiat, graduate Hispanics at rates commensurate with the surrounding community's racial makeup - even as the electorate usually turns out in droves when such hot-button issues can be addressed behind a curtain with a faceless voting stylus.
Even timorous attempts to initiate an honest public discussion of the issue can earn one the cheap slander of "racist." Given the demagoguery of our elected state representatives and the general hostility to frank talk, it's no wonder that ballot propositions, led by unelected partisans and enacted through popular vote, are the preferred mechanism for ventilating the growing discontent. Embittered Califormans decline to challenge the therapeutic bromides offered to Hispanics in their schools and state agencies - but then go quietly to the polls to vent their rage by ending what they see as special concessions to those who broke the law in coming here. It is not a very healthy state of affairs to have a voting population of millions thinking privately what they would never express publicly.
Confusion and disagreement abound even within families. I ask my brother whether he knows the true social costs generated by his plum-picking crew; he barks back, "Go to the mall, then, and get me some of those hardworking American teenagers." At our family Christmas dinner, a teenager
