Mexifornia : A State Of Becoming (Revised)

“Massive illegal immigration from Mexico into California,” Victor Davis Hanson writes, “coupled with a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans, is changing the very nature of state. Yet we Californians have been inadequate in meeting this challenge, both failing to control our borders with Mexico and to integrate the new alien population into our mainstream.”

Noted for his military histories and especially his social commentary of post-9/11 American life, Hanson is a fifth-generation Californian who teaches college classics courses and runs a family farm. Mexifornia is part history, part political analysis, and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in the California over the last quarter century, and how the real losers in the chaos caused by hemorrhaging borders are the Mexican immigrants themselves.

A large part of the problem, Hanson believes, comes from the opportunistic coalition that stymies immigration reform and, even worse, stifles an honest discussion of the growing problem. Corporations, contractors, and agribusiness demand cheap wage labor from Mexico, whatever the social consequences. Meanwhile, academics, journalists, government bureaucrats, and La Raza advocates envision illegal aliens as a vast new political constituency for those committed to the notion that victimhood, not citizenship, is the key to advancement.

Mexifornia is an indictment of the policies that got California into its present mess. But this beautifully written book also reflects Hanson’s strong belief that our traditions of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage may yet remedy a problem that the politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand.