California, Here They Come (and Come)

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.

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

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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.

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.