Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere — and is a slow poison that is largely being ignored.
Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today — and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.
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In Hanson’s own words: “Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards.”
This is a Third World culture, transplanted from Mexico, and living largely outside the scope of American law, state or federal.
Ironically, this is happening in a state notorious for its pervasive and intrusive regulation of the minute details of people’s lives, homes, and businesses. But not out in the Third World enclaves in the Central Valley, where garbage is strewn with impunity and unlicensed swarms of peddlers come and go, selling for cash and charging no sales tax.
While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries, and other parts of what he calls “the technological veneer of the middle class.”
Sadly — and, in the long run, tragically — this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States. It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.
In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments against the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.
The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional.
What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as mascots of the self-congratulatory elites.
These elites are able to indulge themselves in non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others.
The effect of all this on the mascots themselves is not a big concern for the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others. The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed benefactors.
So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize self-destructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their own children to private schools, they needn’t worry about what happens to the children of the mascots in the public schools.
Other people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools can simply be called “racists” for objecting to what the indulgence of the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to other children trapped in the same schools with them.
A hundred years ago, groups that are now indulged as mascots were scapegoated by Progressive-era elites, treated like dirt, and targeted for eradication in the name of “eugenics.”
There are no permanent mascots. As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of tomorrow. But who thinks ahead any more?
If irony came in sizes, we'd be looking at the Crab Nebula here.
Do I have to spell it out? Dr. Sowell sees the abject squalor of these migrants' tent-city existence and doesn't say, "All these snooty, elite liberals do is treat these wretched migrant workers as mascots . . . I am going to actually DO something for them."
(No, I can hear him saying, "All these snooty, elite liberals do is treat these wretched migrant workers as mascots . . . now let's boot these scum outta here!")
My favorite line? "A hundred years ago, groups that are now indulged as mascots were scapegoated by Progressive-era elites, treated like dirt, and targeted for eradication in the name of 'eugenics.'"
Ok, ok! You've waited long enough! It's your turn!
You seem to want to allow anyone to come on in the country, so the onus is on you to DO something. Like Dr. Hanson says, they have their new cars, cell phones, and link cards. Maybe you could give them some government issue shingles to replace the tarps or teach them not to throw garbage all over the road.
The rest of us will debate and use the pen to try and convince our fellow countrymen to control the border and avoid the decline of the nation and avoid the inevitable war that will take place someday if Mexico doesn't cease to be a 3rd world corrupt nation which spills into the U.S.
The point where the problems will begin to be solved is when we stop treating people as a group with all the appropriate group 'rights' that entails and restore the notion that you are an individual that is to be treated the same under the law AS an individual.
No wonder this country is in such bad shape,---Think!!! The only reason the "Progressives" are keeping "Mascots" is to vote for LIBERALS!!! Remember,the second generation can vote---- Legally!
Instead of ignoring the existence of trash, pollution, welfare scamming and cash businesses operating outside the law how about California actually enforcing existing law? I know that sounds too much like the "close the border" mantra for the liberals allowed to post here, but sometimes the simple answer is the best. If I was doing to Grand Terrace what these migrants are doing to Visalia (and yes, I've seen all of it up close very recently) then the city would cite me for code violations and the county would follow suit.
Choosing to ignore lawlessness is immoral, and is dispiriting to those of us who pay for proper permits and "render unto Caesar" what the Franchise Board requires of us. Ignoring the effect of migration from a 3rd world country is reflective of the way our Federal Government ignores the cost to us in the border states. Hospitals here close because too many people use the resource but can't pay for service. We are too virtuous a country to say no, like they do in Mexico to migrants injured along the way who need treatment. So instead, we give until it collapses our system and we shut a hospital that served a larger population. This is not a recipe for success. And the solution will have to be rational and bi- if not tri-partisan.
If you think conservatives are the devil, at least give the devil his due. Thomas Sowell's view is that "compassionate" policies imposed by largely liberal elites are ultimately harmful to those they purport to help. Welfare saps initiative and the work ethic, and enables destructive behavior and the perpetuation of unproductive subcultures. Permissive schooling in the name of ethnic pride or self-esteem renders "mascot" groups unemployable and dooms them to poverty. So liberal policies actually make poor people's lives worse, and eliminating those policies would in fact be "doing something" to benefit poor people. This is a fairly common theme of conservative thought over the last 50 years. You may disagree as a theoretical or empirical matter, but please don't imply that a critique of welfarism equals hatred for the poor.
So, are you trying to make a serious point, or are you just trolling? Because if you're so familiar with those points, why would you suggest that Sowell wants to "persecute" the groups he terms mascots? Or that he has to open a soup kitchen to prove his benevolence toward them? He is advocating repeal of welfarist policies. He believe that such repeal will help poor people/"mascot" groups. If you understand those two points (as you say you do), none of your previous posts make any sense.
Let's set the scene. A bunch of migrant workers pour into California from "down there" over a period of years. They do it because they hear there's work -- work Americans won't do, work farmers won't pay minimum wage for (let alone a living wage!), but work that brings with it the prospect of a life which is a far sight better than the life these migrant workers are running from.
Two things happen over a period of decades: (1) these people have children born in America; and (2) the jobs gradually dry up (Hanson: "The government didn't provide me with enough cheap irrigation water! Waaaaah!").
So now we've got a Third World community in our midst, some of them native born Americans, some of them not. They're dirty, they're slobs, they commit crimes -- they don't even speak English!
After Sowell is finished berating liberals for trifling with these people like Chia pets, and Hanson finishes his bike tour, Sowell and Hanson would . . . what? Go ahead. Finish the thought. I'm all ears.
The particular phenomenon described by Hanson sits at the intersection of two distinct and logically independent topics: illegal immigration and welfarism. One can believe, with the Cato Institute, that borders should be open and that welfare programs should be eliminated. One can also believe, with the few remaining populist/nationalist liberals, that immigration laws should be enforced and that we should maintain a welfare state. Sowell's writings speak for themselves, but my understanding is that he believes that (i) welfarist policies should be rolled back and (ii) immigration laws should be enforced. I believe he would favor either of these policies independently, or both together. But the validity of his critique of the welfare state and its effects on its supposed beneficiaries is not determined by the (logically independent) views he holds on immigration policy.
There's nothing inconsistent about wanting to deport the people Hanson describes, but also favoring, in the absence of deportation, rolling back the welfare state so that those same people are given a greater incentive to work, integrate, etc.
If MikeB had been raised with all of the advantages of Dr. Sowell he would understand it is his problem to fix, not Dr. Sowell viewing the world from his elite perch on high.
Unfortunately, what Dr. Hanson saw is not limited to the central valley or to even to California.
I'm so tired of hearing how we are a nation founded on immigration. That was before the creation of our vast welfare state. We are now a nation that is being destroyed by illegal immigration. Do you think that an "undocumented" is going to hesitate for a moment to lie on an application for gov't aid when they've already shown that they are willing to break the law simply by coming here? Even if this "immigrant" does work or operate a business, do you think he or she will go out of his or her way to pay income taxes? Think again.
My paternal grandfather was born in Mexico. I don't know how he arrived here originally, but he earned his U.S. citizenship through service to his country. But that was another time. I doubt that most persons coming here illegally today would be willing to do the same.
Here's what we DO about it, Mike B. Put more officers on the border; eliminate the welfare incentives; eliminate birthright citizenship; and deport. And keep doing it.
