California, Here they Come : E Pluribus unum is losing to La Raza

Sometime in the last 30 years, we in California gave up on confronting the flood of illegal immigration from Mexico, even as an equally exasperated federal government abdicated its responsibility to control our borders. Now we just shrug at perhaps 10 million illegal immigrants, and let forces larger than ourselves govern our destiny. We remain vaguely aware that one of the world's richest economies is adjacent to one of the poorest-and that chaos sooner or later will result.

For most of the first two centuries of this country's history, we were not so passive nor so naive. Americans felt that newcomers did not need to be taught in their own language in our schools. Indeed, even the most recent trend in American popular culture has been a slow movement away from, rather than toward, racial awareness. Yet we encourage children of Mexican immigrants-desperately in need of immersion in the English language and U.S. history-to enroll in special classes in ethnic pride, and welcome such chauvinism as segregated graduation ceremonies and college dorms predicated on race. Not so long ago, the very idea that a national lobbying group would call itself "The Race" (La Raza), in the manner of the old German racialist concept of Volk, would have seemed absurd, if not repugnant-because immigrants used to come from Mexico largely in the same manner as everyone else: which is to say, legally, and in numbers that did not overwhelm our powers of assimilation or encourage perpetual demagoguery.

We citizens are surely complicit. Here in California we have apartheid communities of exclusively first-generation and illegal immigrants from Mexico who work in the shadows as modern-day helots, yet are not integrated into the civic life of our state in any meaningful way. Millions of Californians who used to cut their own lawns, clean their own toilets, pick their own fruit, and pour their own concrete have now abdicated these tasks to a pool of millions of low-cost industrious laborers-with insidious consequences.

The upper middle class has embraced as its birthright the culture and leisure once confined to an aristocratic elite: nannies, gardeners, and housecleaners. So-called dead-end jobs in agriculture, the service industry, and construction are no longer seen as rites of passage for our youth, but deemed proper only for an entire class of laborers from Mexico, whose toil, we are assured, keeps our restaurants, food, and hotels inexpensive and our prices low. How else can we explain why the local Farm Bureau every summer warns of a shortage of pickers, cries out for guest workers from Mexico, and colludes with Hispanic activists for open borders-even as teenagers a few miles away from unpicked orchards and vineyards idle and hang in the tens of thousands at our air-conditioned malls?

Welcome to the present surreal world of illegal immigration. Unemployment is high and rising in California, but we are told that even more workers from Mexico are needed. Apparently, sometime around 1980, the free market stopped being able to attract legal American employees through rising wages; about the same time, our legal system gave up as well. Now an entire alternative universe of jurisprudence is emerging to mitigate the effects of rampant illegality. Libertarians who champion the employers' entitlement to hire whomever they choose assure us that Mexican immigration over the long term poses no more challenge than 19th-century Italian immigration did-as if multiculturalism had existed in 19th-century schools, government services had been replicated in Italian, we had shared an open border with Italy, and immigrants from Sicily had come here unlawfully and in the millions every year to ensure perpetual first-generation families.

Instead, we are all becoming traffickers in human capital, shying away from the hard truth that our actions perpetuate a very cynical cycle. Young men (solos) at great peril sneak in from Oaxaca. Most work terribly hard for 30 years at roofing, picking, mowing, cleaning, or cooking. And then a great many, disabled and unemployed by age 50- without legal status or English-often turn to state entitlement agencies when their back is out, their job has dried up, or their knees are no longer limber.

Yet their Americanized children of the barrio often grow up without the stern family ethic of Mexico. Much less are they impressed by the employers' old tossed bone that "at least you are better paid than in Mexico": Many of the second generation have never seen Mexico. Instead, too many are understandably resentful that their hard-working-but poorly paid and often uneducated-parents won no riches from their brutal decades of struggle for others more affluent. Four of ten Hispanics are not graduating from high school. One in ten currently has a bachelor's degree. In reaction, employers of physical labor claim to be disappointed that this second generation does not toil as hard and as cheaply as their parents did. So they ignore underrepresentation at college and overrepresentation in our vast legal system, and welcome in a new cohort of undocumented teenagers to renew this amoral cycle.