Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

fact, he is ready to exploit it. The result is that he often makes little effort to assimilate, and then blames the ensuing failure on precisely those whose sense of shame is assuaged by such hostility. The relationship for both is parasitic. The sophisticated white professor allays his fears and anxieties about race on the cheap by championing ethnic studies and bilingualism. (Yet he rarely wishes to live beside, marry among or spend the day with Mexican aliens and their offspring.) In turn, the opportunistic immigrant taps the host's guilt to explain his own easier choice of ethnic separatism and pride. "We owe these people/You people owe us" is now the new symbiosis, replacing the old honesty: "Join us if you wish to be like us/We wish to be like you, so let us join you." When students have identified themselves to me in ethnic terms as "Chicanos" (e.g., "As a Chicano, I say" or "We Chicanos believe"), I have replied with the corresponding, silly racial nomenclature, otherwise never employed in this way ("Yes, as a white person, can I help you?" or "We white people think"). In every case, the student immediately drops the self-identification, upset that anyone else should be so crude as to employ such a racial identity badge.

It is within this larger, global context of population movement - of people trying to leave the misery of poverty in Africa, Asia and South America to find hope in Western countries - that we too in the American Southwest find ourselves dealing with immigrants from Mexico. Let us also be honest about the nature of human traffic. It is not climate, natural resources or race that entices or repels immigrants to new shores. Rather the answer lies with the capacity of Western culture to create capital, provide security, offer freedom and emphasize the individual rather than the tribe. Wealthy Westerners, who prefer low birthrates so as to satisfy their appetites for leisure, freedom and wealth, invite in the poor from Africa, Asia and South America to join them, on the condition that they are willing to work immediately at menial jobs in exchange for some future chance to partake in a free and affluent society. But what starts out as a mutually beneficial relationship soon deteriorates into one of mutual recrimination and theater: the host hectors the immigrant that he is lucky to have escaped his nightmarish home; the new arrival barks back that he now wants near-instant parity with his employer and the right to romanticize his once hated homeland as salve for his wounded pride.

Truth alone is the beginning of remedy, and so we must begin with acceptance of the universal law that determines the direction of immigration. If we do not know why immigrants come, or for reasons of pride or chauvinism are too timid to discuss it, then we live in a doublespeak world and deserve the consequences.

America - and the Southwest particularly - is now unsure about the future. A choice of radically different potential fates awaits us, each predicated on choices we make in the here and now. Things can go very wrong for us if we continue to make poor decisions. The present immigration fiasco is not the result of any one past baneful idea, but arose solely because of the multiplier effects of several developments - many of them errors of omission and laxity rather than of deliberate intent. So let us conclude by reviewing the wide range of alternatives that might await us.

The really perilous course lies in preserving the status quo and institutionalizing our past failed policies: open borders, unlimited immigration, dependence on cheap and illegal labor, obsequious deference to Mexico City, erosion of legal statutes, multiculturalism in our schools, and a general breakdown in the old assimilationist model. True, the power of popular culture can superficially unite us and prevent the dangerous balkanization of the type we have seen in Eastern Europe, at least for a time. But we will still face a slow erosion in our general quality of life, and uncertainty that our group commitment to intermarriage, common popular icons and harmony in the youth culture will translate into a shared or elevated sense of national purpose.

Because too many unskilled Mexicans will come in numbers too great to be easily assimilated, and since their children will no longer be taught the need to accept the common protocols and heritage of American culture, the present pathology will only worsen. The United States will face - is in fact now facing - a terrible choice. Either we lower standards in our schools, businesses and government to ensure full participation by tens of millions who were never given proper education and training, or we maintain de facto a permanent class of modern helots who do the dirty jobs for their Spartan overlords, without ever joining fully in the management of the world that their hard work has helped to create.

If many of the current generation of illegal immigrants remains mired in stoop labor, their offspring will not be content with the solace that life is at least far better than it was in Mexico. Indeed, few sons and daughters of illegal aliens will know anything of Mexico. Millions will simply become jaded that their mothers and fathers work at jobs others won't take and yet make so much less - as they too enter the work force without education, at the bottom of the labor pool. We are all sitting on a demographic time bomb in which a shrinking, mainly white elite is nearing retirement and ready to be subsidized by more numerous, poorly compensated and younger Mexicans.

One solution would be to continue with de facto open borders, but insist on rapid cultural immersion, an absolute and immediate end to all ethnic chauvinism, bilingualism and separatism. There would have to be a domestic Marshall Plan to inculcate the norms and values of traditional education - a core curriculum that emphasizes the American heritage and unifies us through civic