Most convoluted, yet oddly plausible, explanation yet for the difference in
attitudes towards illegal Mexican immigration between California (angry) and
Texas (insouciant). I am paraphrasing from a reader e-mail: “Most of Texas,
certainly eastern Texas, looks the same, and none of it looks anything like
the Garden of Eden. If your town is filling up with people you don’t like,
you move to another town 40 miles away, and hardly notice the difference.
In California, for example, you have this lush coastal strip, backed by,
frankly, desert. Californians who feel obliged to move fear they are being
expelled from Paradise…”
I must say, though, the difference in welfare provision between the two
states seems to me the most convincing explanation. The fact of the welfare
state makes a huge difference to immigration past and present. In the Great
Wave of 1881-1924, large numbers of immigrants — lazy, incompetenet, or
unlucky — found they couldn’t hack it in the USA and went home. Their
present-day equivalents mostly would not–they’d go on welfare instead…
Though, it seems, they’d find it easier to do so in California than in
Mexico.