The New Slave Traffic

Back in 2003, Professor Victor Davis Hanson of Cal State Fresno wrote a book called Mexifornia that caused a sensation. It was the issue that, as Hanson put it, is "the 800-pound gorilla that nobody wants to touch." The cultural Mexicanization of the Southwest:

I got interested in the issue because I’m a fifth-generation farmer and I’ve watched changes in my community. The local school that I used to go to, which was about 60 percent Mexican or Mexican-American, [featured] assimilation, no ideology of “the border crossed us, we didn’t cross the borders”; no bilingual education, Chicano history, just simple assimilation. Those products of that school are quite successful; they run our hometown now. However, just before I came I looked at the rates of schools that are meeting California achievement levels, and in that same school – it’s a mile and a half – it’s 100 percent Mexican, and 9 percent met the minimum level of reading competency, and about 7 percent in mathematics, so something radical has happened.

But the key to it all in history is that the people who join this society must do it in numbers or in a fashion that allows them to be fully integrated and assimilated. Helots in Sparta didn’t work. Metics in Athens didn’t work. Resident aliens in Rome didn’t work, but people in the Empire who were given citizenship did work, and when they were assimilated with Italian culture, it worked.

Hanson is right, of course. Many people like to say "the border crossed us, we did not cross the border." The great difference between the days of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War, and our day today is that the Tejanos and the Californios of that time were thrilled to be free of Mexican rule, they were very proud of their new country, and they wanted to be Americans. Today, many Hispanic children aren't being taught in the English language in American class, and are being taught as if they are Mexicans or Latinos before they are Americans. In some cases they are told that they aren't Americans at all. Part of this is because of the environment and the labor that migrants and their children are subjected to as much as it is the education system.

One way I wanted to write the book, then, is to say, how did this system perpetuate and will it continue and who benefits and who loses? So I looked at each different group. Ostensibly, a person who comes from Mexico and makes $10 an hour in cash feels that he’s reached a bonanza compared to $10 a week, let’s say, in Oaxaca, and it looks great. But I’ve noticed a tragic life cycle: that we and the Mexican government almost traffic in human capital. While it looks good in the beginning, somebody typically – and again, I’m generalizing, but I’ve seen empirically, over my lifetime – people will come from Mexico at 18, 20, usually single males predominantly, they’ll work very, very hard, they’ll be delighted that they’ve had more money in their life, they can send money back and become almost heroic in their village for doing so. But if you follow that work in concrete, hotels, restaurants, landscaping, agriculture, that’s not a rite-of-passage job for people who are here illegally and who don’t know English. It becomes a permanent position, and human nature being what it is, your body cannot withstand that type of work.

So ultimately, at the age of 40 or 50, that dream has sometimes turned into a nightmare because a person may have a bad back, a bad shoulder, and then the employer who either paid cash or low wages or didn’t have a health plan says, well, go to the neighborhood clinic, workman’s comp, Section 8 housing, and the entitlement industry then picks up that added cost. Meanwhile, the children of that immigrant, whose father or mother may not know English and may not be documented, then develops a very different idea. Often he has not, or she has not, been to Mexico. She doesn’t speak Spanish in the same fluency as her parents did, doesn’t read Spanish necessarily, doesn’t know English to the same degree that people that he or she will have to compete with, and has a very different view of America. Often rates of incarceration or gang activity are higher commensurately with the population. But more importantly is the reaction to the employer, and they will tell you, don’t bring anybody onto the cement crew who speaks English because the second generation will not work like the people from Oaxaca. This is the standard – and so then we just renew the cycle and traffic in human capital.

So employers who hire illegals are not interested in bringing new Americans here and melding them into our larger cultural mosaic of peoples from all over the world (as many on the Left say), but are more interested in trafficking in human beings in what has become a modern version of the slave trade.

How are we treating American citizens of Mexican heritage who are here legally and who have done everything right according to the law? In Dr. Hanson's example, pretty crappy:

And this whole illegal universe ripples in very strange places. For example, when I'm teaching a class in the humanities, a student will come to me, often Mexican, of Mexican heritage, who’s a citizen, or a person from any heritage, from Nevada, Arizona, and say, why do I have to pay $5,000 for tuition when somebody who’s here illegally from California pays two thousand? And I usually use the standard argument, well, perhaps their parents – well, no, no, he’s only been here five years, or he doesn’t pay California State income tax. And often they’ll say, well, should I go down to Mexico and come in illegally and then perhaps I’ll get a discount?

And Californians, says Hanson, have come to depend on the new slavery to maintain their wealthy way of life.

In between it’s the California suburban average citizen who likes the idea of cheap food, going to a restaurant pretty cheap, and has developed the lifestyle of the 19th century aristocrat in some ways. Whoever thought that a Californian who was middle class, perhaps with a combined income of $100,000, could have somebody from Mexico here illegally to cut his lawn, clean his home, watch his children? And then at the same time that’s happening, he’s upset that if he goes and he looks at certain statistics of poverty, incarceration, education, that some of these groups who come from Mexico are represented in proportions that are higher than their representation in the population. So there’s all of this strange political mix, and the result in California, which we’re always a therapeutic society, is simply not to talk about it.

We have it pretty good here in Tennessee. We have a low cost of living, pay no income tax, and in East Tennessee many-if not the majority of us, are landowners. With the thousands upon thousands of people who are now pouring into our towns and hamlets from south of the Border each year and who are performing backbreaking labor at a menial wage, are we endanger of becoming dependent on a "new slave traffic," just as Hanson says has happened in California?