(VDH article cont’d from above)
Certainly after twenty-one years of teaching Latin, Greek, and humanities to immigrants at CSU Fresno, both legal and illegal, I believed that the melting pot can still work and most Hispanic arrivals integrate, assimilate, and intermarry with increasingly frequency despite the often-shrill protestations of campus identity politics advocates.
But the numbers of illegal immigrants have become so large—ranging from an estimated 11–20 million now residing in the United States—that both pessimism and optimism are now warranted. If only ten percent have criminal records or inordinately break laws, then the good news is that many millions more are likely working and crime free. The bad news is that somewhere between one and two million have entered our country illegally and repaid that generosity with criminality or ID theft or fraud.
Our local town has erected a sort of clannish statue of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the mother snake goddess to whom thousands were sacrificed, with the ill-fitting caption Viva La Raza (literally, “long live the race”). But I think most of our town’s overwhelming Mexican-American and Mexican population are about as indifferent to it as my Swedish ancestors’ children in the nearby town of Kingsburg are oblivious to various Swedish totems (although none of them are emblazoned with Viva ett ras!).
The tragedy of illegal immigration is that it did not have to be this way. Legal, measured, meritocratic, and diverse immigration leads to rapid assimilation and Americanization and enriches the country culturally and economically.
Its antithesis—illegal, mass, non-meritocratic, and non-diverse immigration—hinders the melting pot. It fuels tribalism, while incurring vast costs in social services to ensure some sort of parity for those from impoverished southern Mexico and Central America. The wages of our citizen working poor and their access to needed social services are not helped by thousands of new arrivals without legality and English.
Yet illegal immigration in such numbers certainly empowers a host of special interests. So it continues. Employers prefer cheap labor and often worry little about the social consequences of their workers once they age, have families, or become ill or injured.
Ethnic activists seem energized when their constituents assimilate slowly and require collective representation.
The Democratic Party has learned that the blue-ing of California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico is a paradigm of how to flip Arizona and Texas.
The Mexican government counts on billions in annual remittances from mostly illegal immigrants in the United States who serve as a safety valve for Mexico City to defer needed social and economic change. (In the first eleven months of 2017 Mexicans living abroad sent home $26.1 billion, most of it from north of the border.) The expatriate community in the United States seems to grow fonder of Mexico the farther it is distant.
A final note. Most who write of the positives of open borders and the supposed nativism and xenophobia of those who worry about illegal immigration choose not to experience firsthand the concrete consequences of their own advocacies. By that I mean that despite virtue-signaling, their children rarely attend impacted public schools. They do not socialize or live next to illegal immigrants. And to the degree that they interact with the undocumented, it is mostly as employers to landscapers, housekeepers, nannies, servers, and cooks who magically disappear after work.
In contrast, many of those who are worried most about illegal immigration are often now second- and third-generation Mexican Americans whose schools, neighborhoods, and social services are increasingly in crisis due to the sheer number of those who have arrived without legality, a high school diploma, and English but in sore need of government help.
Much of what we read about illegal immigration seems to have little to do with the reality of those most directly influenced by it.
https://www.hoover.org/research/dive...al-immigration