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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953 in Fowler, California, did his undergraduate work at the University of California–Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. work at Stanford University. A specialist in military history, he has taught classics at California State University–Fresno. A noted conservative, Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. This piece first appeared at realclearpolitics.com on May 25, 2006.

Our Brave New World of Immigration

In the dark of these rural spring mornings, I see full vans of Mexican laborers speeding by my farmhouse on their way to the western side of California’s San Joaquin Valley to do the backbreaking work of weeding cotton, thinning tree fruit, and picking strawberries.

In the other direction, even earlier morning crews drive into town — industrious roofers, cement layers, and framers heading to a nearby new housing tract. While most of us are still asleep, thousands of these hardworking young men and women in the American Southwest rise with the sun to provide the sort of unmatched labor at the sort of wages that their eager employers insist they cannot find among citizens.

But just when one thinks that illegal immigration is an efficient win-win way of providing excellent workers to needy businesses, there are also daily warnings that there is something terribly wrong with a system predicated on a cynical violation of the law.

Three days ago, as I watched the daily early-morning caravan go by, I heard a horrendous explosion. Not far from my home, one of these vans had crossed the white line down the middle of the road and hit a pickup truck head-on. Perhaps the van had blown a bald tire. Perhaps the driver was intoxicated. Or perhaps he had no experience driving an overloaded minivan at high speed in the dark of early morning.

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5 We will probably never know — since the driver ran away from the carnage of the accident. That often happens when an illegal alien who survives an accident has no insurance or driver’s license. But he did leave in his wake his three dead passengers. Eight more people were injured. Both cars were totaled. Traffic was rerouted around the wreckage for hours.

Ambulances, fire trucks, and patrol cars lined the nearby intersection. That accident alone must have imparted untold suffering for dozens of family members, as well as cost the state thousands of dollars.

Such mayhem is no longer an uncommon occurrence here. I have had four cars slam into our roadside property, with the drivers running off, leaving behind damaged vines and trees, and wrecked cars with phony licenses and no record of insurance. I have been broadsided by an undocumented driver, who ran a stop sign and then tried to run from our collision.

These are the inevitable but usually unmentioned symptoms of illegal immigration. After all, the unexpected can often happen when tens of thousands of young males from Mexico arrive in a strange country, mostly alone, without English or legality — an estimated 60 percent of them without a high-school degree and most obligated to send nearly half of their hard-won checks back to kin in Mexico.

Many Americans — perhaps out of understandable and well-meant empathy for the dispossessed who toil so hard for so little — support this present open system of non-borders. But I find nothing liberal about it.

10 Zealots may chant ¡Sí, se puede! all they want. And the libertarian right may dress up the need for cheap labor as a desire to remain globally competitive. But neither can disguise a cynicism about illegal immigration, one that serves to prop up a venal Mexican government, undercut the wages of our own poor, and create a new apartheid of millions of aliens in our shadows.

We have entered a new world of immigration without precedent. This current crisis is unlike the great waves of nineteenth-century immigration that brought thousands of Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Asians to the United States. Most immigrants in the past came legally. Few could return easily across an ocean to home. Arrivals from, say, Ireland or China could not embrace the myth that our borders had crossed them rather than vice versa.

Today, almost a third of all foreign-born persons in the United States are here illegally, making up 3 to 4 percent of the American population. It is estimated that the United States is home to 11 or 12 million illegal aliens, whose constantly refreshed numbers ensure there is always a perpetual class of unassimilated recent illegal arrivals. Indeed almost one-tenth of Mexico’s population currently lives here illegally!

But the real problem is that we, the hosts, are also different from our predecessors. Today we ask too little of too many of our immigrants. We apparently don’t care whether they come legally or learn English — or how they fare when they’re not at work. Nor do we ask all of them to accept the brutal bargain of an American melting pot that rapidly absorbs the culture of an immigrant in exchange for the benefits of citizenship.

Instead, we are happy enough that most labor vans of hardworking helots stay on the road in the early-morning hours, out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes, though, they tragically do not.

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Topics for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. Speakers and writers who take care to present themselves as decent, trustworthy people are concerned with what the Greeks called ethos, character. What impression do you get of Victor Davis Hanson’s character from the first two paragraphs? If you had to guess — basing your guess only on the first two paragraphs — where Hanson stood on immigration, what would you say? Why?

  2. Hanson’s title alludes to Aldous Huxley’s 1931 dystopian novel, Brave New World. In that story, a World State has established a global caste system in which the lower castes are systematically bred to work for the hedonistic enjoyments of the upper castes. Habituated to conformity, all citizens are discouraged from thinking critically about the status quo. What is the purpose of Hanson’s analogy between our own and Huxley’s “brave new world”?

  3. Paragraph 3 begins with “But,” a clear transition indicating that the essay will be going in a different direction. What other words in the third paragraph indicate what the writer’s position will be?

  4. What does Hanson mean in paragraph 3 when he calls the labor market in the San Joaquin Valley “a system predicated on a cynical violation of the law”? Do you agree with that description? Why, or why not?

  5. In paragraph 11, Hanson speaks of “the myth that our borders had crossed [the immigrants from Mexico]” rather than vice versa. What does he mean by this? Do you agree that it is a myth? Explain your response.

  6. What are the differences between current immigration from Mexico and historic immigration from Europe a century ago (see para. 11)?

  7. How does Hanson know that “almost a third of all foreign-born persons in the United States are here illegally” (para. 12)? Could it be that from a sample of arrested immigrants, 30 percent or so turn out to be illegal? Is such a method of calculation persuasive? Explain your response.

  8. In his next-to-last paragraph, Hanson says, “We apparently don’t care whether [immigrants] come legally or learn English.” Do you agree with this assertion? On what evidence do you base your response?

  9. Evaluate Hanson’s final paragraph. Given his earlier paragraphs, does the paragraph make an effective ending? Why, or why not?