Nation of Immigrants and Emigrants I

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-b ... _Immigrant

Published: Apr 13, 2006
Author: Dr. Thomas Fleming

I consider myself lucky to have been in Mexico during both rounds of the Mexican demonstrations that have been staged to protest any enforcement of US immigration law. I was in Mexico gathering impressions: I thought it might be nice to know what lies in store for all of us. My extended observations on immigration, I shall save for the Chronicles issue and the book we are putting out. But since I have been away so long, not only from the office but away from my computer (I didn’t fancy hauling my laptop with it’s “STEAL THIS” sign around Mexico on a bus), I really should sketch out a few preliminary observations on this issue.

Let us begin by stating the obvious. The members of Congress, with a few honorable exceptions, are willing to do nothing to slow, much less halt the flow of legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico. Everyone knows the reason: Democrats are looking for slaves to their party and the welfare state; Republicans are looking for cheap labor and are under the continuing delusion that they will woo Hispanic voters. Neither gives a rap for a country they can scarcely regard as their own or for the world their children and grandchildren will live in.

The same goes for most of the policy wonks who work on the issue. When I listen to the lies and nonsense uttered by the anti-immigration “experts,” the reaction is somewhere between a laugh and a gag reflex. One of them, whom I’d rather not name, has been running around citing figures to show that most illegals had jobs back in Mexico. But, since the household income is less than $7000 per year and, for the most part, we are getting workers from well below the median, those jobs amount to very little.

Think about this. Once upon a time, Mexicans were proverbial for laziness. Now they are proverbial for hard work. What has happened? Many things, obviously, but one important thing is impoverishment. Most Mexicans I have met, both up here and down there, prefer Mexico to the United States, but they also prefer eating to starving.

It is simply foolish to pretend that economic motives are not predominant and even more foolish to pretend that on balance legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico are not costing American taxpayers a great deal of money. Education costs alone are staggering, to say nothing of the cost of paying for the immigrants’ healthcare, welfare, and crimes. Of course, illegals are not eligible for health and welfare benefits—though their children do have the “right” to attend public schools—but illegals clever enough to acquire multiple bogus social security cards will not let a little red tape stand in their way.

Do not expect to see any hard numbers on the cost of immigration, since our governments generally refuse to collect the data. Here in Illinois, the head of the Minutemen, Rosanna Pulido (of 100% Mexican extraction and 100% loyal American) was unable to find out if the Mexican trucker who wiped out an entire family was here legally. County officials shipped his body back to Mexico—presumably with the four fake ID’s he was carrying—and refused to comment on his status.

But even though the primary motives are economic, we would be making a big mistake if we failed to realize that Mexican immigrants generally—not just spokesmen for Aztlan or LULAC—have not absorbed the ideology of the Reconquista. The Spaniards stole the land from the Indians; the Norteamericanos stole the land from the Mexicans; and now it is time to get back a little of what they are owed. It is this ideology—and not merely a typically Latino skeptical view of law and order—that gives illegal immigrants their puzzling self-righteousness in defying US laws.

So, here we are in a three-sided debate. On one side are a vast number of recent immigrants who insist they are entitled to the benefits of American citizenship. On another are the patriots—many of them of Mexican descent—who call for enforcement of existing laws and tightening of restrictions. On the third side—the side that has all the power—are leftists like George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neoconservative “brain” trust, who think nations are a figment of the imagination and who fear and loathe the few real Americans they have ever contact with. Supporting them, whether they like it or not, are most self-described conservatives, whose limited education and moral confusion have turned them into mere creatures of the state.

I have been going to Mexico to find answers to one simple question. What will America be like, once it has assimilated itself to, say, 100 million Mexicans? This is not to say that our efforts to stanch the bleeding border are doomed to failure, but the prospects are not especially bright. The political class is uniformly against any serious reform—conservatives are more opposed than leftists—and I sense very little backlash against the demonstrations.

I’ll talk more about this later, but the plain fact is that we have reinvented America as an abstract nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Every time a new group stepped up to demand its share of rights—and our money—we Americans have given them everything the asked for: blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals. We are programmed to see ourselves in a drama of good and evil, in which traditional Americans are evil, aliens and outsiders are good. The only way to redeem ourselves for our skin color, religion, and traditions is to sacrifice the interests of our children to the morally privileged minorities. Of such people and such a mentality, no counter-revolution can be made.

I considered spending time in Mexican barrios in Los Angeles and Chicago, but that is hardly fair. Mexico is a varied country, and we should be willing, however grudgingly, to look at the Mexican reality instead of confining ourselves to worst-case scenarios.

First, let me get this off my chest right away. I really like Mexico. I have recently sampled three quite different cities: Chihuahua, Juarez, and Mexico (as they call the capital) itself. Previously I had been once or twice to Acuña across the border from Del Rio. Acuña—part tourist-trap, part slum—is the sinkhole that is the setting for El Mariachi. Yes, Mexico is dirty, disorganized, poor, corrupt, and dangerous, but it is a wonderful country, as obsessed with its mythological past as any part of the Balkans. (I now understand why Serbs like Mexican music.) Mexican history, from the Aztecs and the conquistadores to Fr. Hidalgo to Santa Anna and Juarez to Villa and Zapata cannot fail to stir the imagination.

The Mexicans I have met over the years and most recently on my travels were wonderful people: courteous, grave, yet full of life. Mexican writers like Octavio Paz, with whom I spent some time about 15 years ago, have a brilliance and vivacity that is hard to find anywhere in the Anglo/Northern European world. In short, though both Mexico and the United States have been engaged in an unremitting struggle to destroy the identity and culture of their peoples, we with out “Yankee know-how” have succeeded, while the poor Mexicans—as incompetent in achieving cultural suicide as in managing an economy—have so far failed.

And yet—to anticipate the thesis of the essays I am working on—the massive immigration of Mexicans to the United States will be our final undoing. There are several reasons for this, some of them as obvious as the fact that most of the immigrants come from this poorest, least-educated, least “Europeanized” segments of Mexican society. Others are more subtle. Let us grant the most extravagant claims for the virtues of the Mexicans—and the more I see of Mexico the more I am wiling to grant them. Nonetheless, these virtues are, for the most part, not quite our virtues (such as remain to us), and even where we use the same language, we mean something different by such terms as courage, honor, manliness, chastity, and marital fidelity. They are Latin and Indian—brave, Stoical, and passionate—but they also exhibit a tendency toward irrational violence, inertia, and erotic melodrama. Octavo Paz, in his famous musings on the “Pachuco” phenomenon, thought Anglo-Americans were frightened by these dandy hoodlums. Perhaps we were not frightened, but we were and are profoundly disturbed by a people far more alien than any European.

The overlapping of the two cultures has not been productive, much less impressive. Few Mexican restaurants in the US give any sense of the wonderful variety of Mexican cuisine, and Carolos Fuentes, in one of the stories in his novel, The Crystal Frontier, portrays the discomfiture of a Mexican gourmet lecturing to American students on his native cuisine. To prove that America has a great cuisine too, they take him to a McDonald’s—the Misesians’ favorite fine dining establishment. They might just as well have taken him to a Taco Bell. Mexico has exported bad food, violent youths, and sexual promiscuity to American communities, and in return they have received American pop culture—That 70’s Show (with much cleaned-up subtitles), rap, and the American child-man’s refusal to dress like a grown-up when he goes out to dinner.

Where we can see the contamination of the two cultures most clearly is in border towns like that vast urban sprawl that comprises El Paso and Juarez or Laredo/Nuevo Laredo or San Diego Tijuana. These places, for the most part, represent both Mexico and the United States at their worst.

El Paso-Juarez is the most emblematic. The two cities, originally one, are roughly of the same size; both have suffered seriously from urban decay and to a more grotesque degree from the “urban renewal” planned by short-sighted and greedy developers and politicians. There are pleasant neighborhoods in both cities, and, while El Paso has a more interesting historic core with one good hotel and one good restaurant and while Juarez exhibits signs of a growing economy, it is Juarez that attracts the tourists (and not simply for cheap booze) and El Paso that draws the workers.

El Paso, with its barrios comprising most of the sprawl, is scarcely an American city, and the American border guards hardly speak any more English than their Mexican counterparts, but there is this difference: Mexican immigration officials and guards on the Juarez tend to be polite and friendly—though some of their cops maintain a ferocious grimace—while our Mexican officials combine the ferocity of the Federales with the manners of a sullen teenager.

Over in Juarez, the city fathers are doing their best to ape suburbanized America. The Paseo del Triunfo de la Revolucion has been ravaged by Americanization. The bullring has been torn down to make way for a shopping development, and the widened street is now adorned with chain restaurants and chain motels (including the very good Holiday Inn Express where Chilton Williamson and I spent two pleasant nights.) Juarez and the other border towns show the worst side of Mexico.

Border towns are dangerous places, but the State Department cheerfully reminds us that the prime targets for murder are drug dealers, policemen, and journalists.

Unimaginary dialogue:

“What is your purpose in coming to Mexico, Señor Fleming?”

“Tourism. Just tourism.”

If Juarez or Nuevo Laredo are our future, then we had better follow my wife’s plan, which is to move deep into Mexico to escape the immigrants.

TO BE CONTINUED