Why the Arizona Law — And Why Now? By Victor Davis Hanson
Arizona’s tough new anti-illegal-immigration legislation empowers law enforcement officials to ask for proof of citizenship from “suspicious” people in the course of inquiry about other, unrelated infractions. The new policies follow the tenets of federal immigration law; but the law’s passage, by design, highlights the habitual failure of Washington — for political reasons — to enforce its own statutes. So Arizona has become a punching bag for opportunistic politicians, incurred boycotts, and been charged with establishing the new Gestapo. “When I heard about it, it reminded me of Nazi Germany,” Hispanic Federation President Lillian Rodriguez Lopez said.
The furor indicates how surreal the issue of illegal immigration has become in the United States. Under the present de facto enforcement policy, a group of Hispanic-looking, Spanish-speaking young males can be detained by immigration agents at or near the border — on the logical assumption that they are Mexican nationals seeking to enter the United States illegally. But should they make their way undetected a few miles into the United States, and then be pulled over by police officials for a traffic violation, they are immune from having to prove that they are legal residents. Indeed, the real outrage was not the new law per se, but the prior existence of municipal statutes in major cities of the American southwest that prohibited police officers from even inquiring about the immigration status of those they arrested until formal warrants were filed.
Despite the negative commentary concerning the law in the mainstream newspapers and news outlets, roughly 60% of Americans poll that they either approve of Arizona’s action — or feel it is still too lax. When polls turn even more specifically to the right of the police to question the immigration status of those detained on other matters, nationwide support grows even stronger, according to a recent Pew poll, to 73%. In the same Pew poll, 54% express disapproval of President Obama’s handling of immigration issues for not doing more to secure the border.
What has brought on this renewed collective anger at illegal immigration? First, the number of illegal aliens, in addition to their children born as citizens on American soil, continues to grow. For the last decade, we have relied on a static guess of about 11 million illegal aliens. But such an estimate, even with deportations and voluntary returns, cannot be forever frozen — given the yearly influxes of aliens from Mexico and Latin America.
Some estimates instead now put the figure at over 15 million aliens — and perhaps higher still. In the case of Arizona, one in ten residents is now thought to be an illegal alien — nearly similar to the ratio in California as well, where 3-5 million illegal aliens are thought to reside. With such a sizable population of illegal aliens in the United states, entire swaths of the American Southwest have undergone radical changes that affect almost every aspect of daily life — fiscally strapped state and local governments, longer waiting lines at hospital emergency rooms given the need for translators in treating the non-English-speaking uninsured; ballots and government communications in both English and Spanish; knowledge that thousands of fellow drivers on the road do not have authentic licenses, insurance, registration, or driver training; and admission that civil law is now openly ignored — from matters of multiple families residing in single-family dwellings to billions in dollars paid out as cash, off-the-books wages.
The current recession has also obviated some of the need for cheap foreign labor. With near 10% unemployment — and far higher in many states in the American Southwest — the old truism that Americans won’t cut lawns, wash dishes, make beds or pick oranges, might be no longer quite so true. President Bush was not able to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” between 2004- 2006, despite his reelection mandate, a booming economy and, for a time, strong majorities in both houses of Congress. It is likely, then, that President Obama cannot do so either in the midst of a deep recession. Then there is not just increased crime in Mexico, but savage crime — more than 5,000 were murdered in drug-related shootings last year. And over the last years the killing is spilling across the border and sometimes directed against Ameri-can citizens. One of the catalysts for the Arizona law was the wanton murder of well-liked Arizona rancher Robert Krentz by probable drug-running aliens who had crossed his property on the border.
Denying the legal implications of border chaos in Arizona and throughout the Southwest is the part of the illegal immigration lobby’s argument that is most mendacious. In Los Angeles County alone, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder are believed to be issued for illegal aliens, who make up 65% of all felony arrest warrants in the county. The California penal system presently is believed to house over 20,000 illegal alien felons, somewhere between 10-15% of the total prison population.
The post-September-11 era has made the idea of open borders appear lunatic. Why spend billions to secure our seaports, air terminals, and northern border, when one can simply walk into the United States from Mexico in thousands of places? The recent terrorist attempts on the New York subway, Maj. Hasan’s murder spree at Fort Hood, the so-called Christmas Day panty bomber, and the failed car bomb in Times Square remind Americans that radical Islamists are constantly probing American defenses, including our southern border. (Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, who was smuggled in this way in 2001, later pleaded guilty to providing support to Hezbollah, and was sentenced to five years in prison.) Even though few terrorist plots have so far been attributed to smuggling from Mexico, the threat is real.
Illegal immigration must now be seen, moreover, against a larger backdrop of revolutionary leftist transformation in Latin America and Mexico. Fidel Castro is no longer an isolate, but is rather seen as a prophetic figure by Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Manuel Zeyala, and other radical Latin America strongmen, who whip up popular anger against supposed Yankee imperialism. There are not just an abundance of Mexican flags at May Day open border demonstrations in the United States, but now often Che Guevara placards as well.
(Editor's Note: Carlos Santana wears a Che Guevara t-shirt on stage and actor Ashton Kutcher wears Che's image on a chain around his neck - just to name two celebrities on the anti-America bandwagon.)
Would-be revolutionary fervor translates into something like labor activist Dolores Huerta lecturing Arizona school children that “Republicans hate Latinos.”
Arizonans are also aware of the extent — who would know better? — of the degree to which conditions south of the border have deteriorated in the last decades. Mexico was always poor in comparison with the United States, but undertook a disastrous policy to embrace a centralized, state run economy in the 1970's which produced hyperinflation, high unemployment, and slow growth. Within twenty years, Mexico went from an economy that was 37% the size of American’s to one barely a quarter as large. In response, millions fled northward both to escape poverty — and to help further acerbate it at home by their flight and abandonment of families and communities.
And finally, the recent initiative in Arizona is an acknowledgement that while illegal immigration continues unabated, its supporters have adduced no new arguments to defend it. Indeed, there is a growing realization that there is no rationale for such massive illegal immigration — except those talking points that, by nature, rub Americans the wrong way. Advocacy for open borders de facto translates into brazenly breaking American law. And in this connection it is important to note that immigration activists do not advocate rewriting American law to match present day reality, only that we do not enforce the very laws we make. Do we really wish a precedent that residents can pick and choose which statutes should apply to themselves? If immigration law is negotiable, why not traffic and tax codes? Few explicitly defend the unfair notion that hundreds of thousands of foreigners wait patiently in line to immigrate legally — and are thereby made to seem foolish by the millions who have simply broken the law and crossed when and as they chose. Supporters of the present noncompliance do not argue — or at least not openly — that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico, or at least should be made accessible to Mexican nationals by virtue of their ethnic pedigrees. Instead, the arguments for unchecked illegal immigration are negative: those who wish to enforce existing federal immigration law must be anti-immigrant, racist, nativist or simply callous, inasmuch as Mexico does America a great service by granting easy leave for its poor to work for more affluent northern employers.
A Poverty of Reason
The status of the present debate, then, reflects a poverty of reasoning. We argue whether the tough new Arizona immigration laws are constitutional and in harmony with national statutes — even as all parties accept that federal legislation itself is by design habitually unenforced. The new stretches of high border fences are either caricatured as retrograde and ineffective, or compared to the Berlin Wall, although that malicious edifice kept people in, not out. Yet few privately dispute that those sections of high, layered fences along the border have drastically curtailed or at least redirected illegal cross-border traffic. It is the success of the border fence now in progress, not its failure, that convinced President Obama to suspend work before its completion.
Euphemism and dysphemism also characterize the argument. Opponents of open borders are denounced as “anti-immigrant” — as in then-candidate Barack Obama’s smear that the rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.” Note the desire in such accusations is to both personalize and obfuscate the issue into racial anger against Juan, the legal immigrant, rather than the principled criticism of an influx of millions illegally into the country. “Illegal alien” is often taboo usage, not on grounds that the nomenclature is inaccurate — foreigner nationals really do arrive here by breaking our laws — but that it is “insensitive.” Better, then, to employ a term that is both inaccurate and often misleading. Such is “undocumented worker,” a phrase that hardly begins to describe several millions who are neither working nor ever possessed authentic immigration documents to begin with.
Likewise, “comprehensive immigration reform” usually does not mean altering existing immigration law per se to weigh factors such as education, capital, or country of origin in granting citizenship. Instead, it too is a euphemism for a specific sort of mass amnesty for foreign nationals from Latin America currently residing illegally in the country. The idea of illegality itself has often devolved into a “civil infraction” or “technicality,” as we are reminded that passports and border control were once in our distant past not really required.
The two favorite occasions for mass demonstrations in behalf of illegal immigration — May Day and Cinco de Mayo — show the reverse side of the “sensitive” politically correct arguments. Both are intertwined with hard left ideology and Mexican nationalism. Both seem designed to turn off independent voters who were once assured the issue of illegal immigration was about opportunity, and had nothing to do with political agendas and ethnic chauvinism. Fairly of not, citizens recoil at the sight of thousands waving the flag of the country that they do not wish to return to at the same time they are angrily denouncing the majority of a country in which they wish to reside. The tired charge of racism is still used to silence the qualms such demonstrations cause, as the plight of contemporary Mexican nationals is grafted onto the grievances of second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans and other minority groups.
The ensuing mini dramas seem to have come from a theatre of the absurd. Representatives from the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”) lecture others on the dangerous racial overtones of the current illegal immigration acrimony, while insisting that their own nomenclature does not really imply racial chauvinism. Illegal aliens with Latino surnames, in theory, can enter into the affirmative action industry for preferential treatment in educational advancement and support, apparently on the theory that the moment that foreign nationals cross the border, they ipso facto suffer historical American oppression and thus are in needed of proper compensation.
Privately, all parties in the debate would pro ably acknowledge that should each year a million white French-Canadians — without English, legality, or high school diplomas — try to flee southward into New York and Vermont, there would be outrage. And we can imagine that state trooper of the northeast would more likely ask for identification from suspect cars of French-speaking only white males than from nearby Hispanic English-speaking citizens of Burlington.
A recent incident at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California reflects the growing ethnic tensions that result from massive illegal immigration, changing demography, and a multiculturalism that asks very little in terms of assimilation from the recent arrival or even from a second- or third-generation Mexican-American community. The well meaning high school granted Mexican-American students a Cinco de Mayo celebration. Five students this year wore American flag regalia. They were suspended for provocative behavior — although the celebration was characterized by Mexican flags in abundance. Student Annicia Nunez summed up the Hispanic students’ anger at the American flag wearing five: “I think they should apologize ‘cause it is a Mexican heritage day. We don’t deserve to get disrespected like that. We wouldn’t do that on Fourth of July.” Deconstruct that sentiment: Mexican-American students apparently did not feel that the Fourth of July is their own independence day, but did believe that the American flag is a provocative sign of disrespect. The administrators who suspended the five — national outrage followed and forced the school district to backtrack — sacrificed the constitutional protection of free speech to the demands of multiculturalism, which in turn dictated that a foreign flag was given preeminence over the American flag. How did the trivial incident end? A walk-out of 200 Mexican-American students ensued, who marched downtown shouting protests at the appearance of American flag symbolism. At a postfacto school assembly both flags were placed side by side and students were asked to let bygones be bygones.
Mexico’s role in illegal immigration also plays a role in this surreal drama. It by design facilitates illegal immigration northward — remember its 2004 publication of a comic book, Guida del Migrante Mexicano, advising its citizens how to cross illegally into its neighbor’s territory. The growing number of Mexican consulate offices in the United States — currently over 50 and growing — often protest the American treatment of illegal aliens, even as the Mexican government encourages their flight and is cited by human rights groups for its customary inhumane treatment of Central Americans that cross its own southern borders “illegally.” Indeed the consulates now advocate the inclusion of Mexican textbooks in predominantly Hispanic American schools, as part of Mexico City’s vow to recognize that “the Mexican nation extends beyond its borders.”
Nor are such maneuvers in any sense sentimental. The huge expatriate community in the United States results on average in about $20-30 billion in annual remittances from its former residents. Such massive transfers of wealth subsidize Mexico City’s responsibility to care for its own needy. Remittances presently rank as the second largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. Rarely is there concern expressed in Mexico City that such transfers ensure that its own expatriates in the United States are poor, and often will require billions in American entitlements to subsidize their housing, nutritional, educational, and legal needs.
Cui Bono?
Corporate employers — once most prominently in agriculture, now more commonly in the hospitality industries, construction, and landscaping — want cheap, industrious laborers without much legal protection or social activism. In a tragic merry-go-round, they eagerly snap up young, single hard-working laborers from central Mexico, and, when they age, or are hurt, direct them to government social services — even as they look to yet another youthful replacement cohort to cross the border. For many of those without legality, education, or English, once considered entry-level jobs quickly become lifetime, low-wage employment. Until recently, the editorials of the Wall Street Journal were not much different from those of La Voz de Aztlan in their shared advocacy for open borders. Note here that American unions in the last thirty years weighed their political correct sensitivities against the self-interests of their own American citizen workers — and came down on the side of the former, adopting a strategy of silence about illegal immigration. Even though statistics prove that nothing has depressed the wages of entry-level workers in the southwest more, union leaders were worried of incurring the wrath of Democratic politicians eager for new constituencies. Perhaps they assumed that in time aliens would qualify for yet another amnesty, and thus swell the pool of unskilled workers that in the future would be in need of union representation.
The two political parties also hand in glove conspired to undermine immigration laws. Democrats consistently opposed closing the border. The party leadership was both hostage to ethnic activists and open to the arguments that today’s dependent would be tomorrow’s voters — to be embedded within a vast network of entitlement which in turn requires an ever larger publicly employed cadre to administer such subsidies. Due largely to decades of illegal immigration that helped the Mexican and Mexican-American population grow 53% alone in the 1980's, there may well be 97 million Hispanics by 2050, or about a quarter of the projected U.S. population. When a beleaguered Barack Obama called for voters to turn out in 2010, it was no surprise that he reflected these demographic realities — ”young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 [must] stand together once again.”
Republicans often ignored the law with equal gusto. Corporate lobbyists insisted on access to cheap labor. And party strategists kept assuring the rank and file that Mexican nationals are churchgoing, conservative in their support for traditional social values, anti-abortion, pro-military, and pro-family — in short, that today’s Mexican illegal aliens would be tomorrow’s Cubans.
Meanwhile, the ethnic industry — most often centered in Chicano-Latino Studies Departments, advocacy journalism, the liberal think tanks, and politics — grasped that unchecked immigration from Latin America was central to its own growing influence. A closed border, a static and shrinking pool of Mexican nationals, a soon to be integrated, intermarried and fully assimilated Latino population — all that reduced the need for collective representation and identity politics. Indeed, without illegal immigration, there would in time be as much need for a Department of Chicano-Latino Studies as there would be a Department of Scottish-Irish Studies.
An annual influx of hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated Spanish speakers has also been a boon for practitioners of race-based research, which can in perpetuity show disparities in income, health care, and education. In the decade and a half between 1990 and 2004, poverty rates among Hispanics grew 52%, and accounted for 92% of the increase in the numbers of American poor — despite expansions in federal and state entitlements. In other words, open borders mean millions of the indigent from central Mexico, cross the borders, and are almost instantly factored into American statistics of resident poor. They cement the argument for more federal entitlements to ensure parity for a growing Hispanic underclass without legality, education, or English fluency. The ensuing grievance industry, then, invests in the theory that inherent racial prejudice, not the consequences of massive illegal immigration, explains why, for example, second-generation Hispanics drop out of high school at far higher rate — reported as two and a half times higher — than whites or Asians. The Los Angeles school district is roughly 73% Hispanic; and nearly 60% of that student body do not graduate from high school. Median household income had risen by the mid-1990's for all groups — except Hispanics whose incomes plunged by over 5%, largely by the inclusion of poorly educated and impoverished illegal aliens from Mexico.
The Catholic churches of the American southwest are often immune from criticism for their support for illegal immigration. But loud protests — always couched in humanitarian terms of protecting the weak and poor — from Catholic bishops have done their own part to wear down enforcement of immigration law. The pubic is to accept that a Cardinal Roger Mahoney, Archbishop of the Los Angeles Diocese, for example, is following divine rather earthly guidance when, in the wake of the Arizona law, he announces that the diocese will disobey new enforcement-only immigration legislation. Yet when a demagogic Bishop Mahoney slurs Arizonans as “now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques,” he is apparently cognizant that the vast majority of arriving Latin American aliens are Catholic, and will provide a much needed constituency at a time of a static American born Catholic population.
Usually liberal politicians lambaste the intrusion of religion into politics, but not when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly asks the priests of the Catholic Church to tell their congregations to stop opposing President’s Obama’s immigration reform package, “The people, some [who] oppose immigration reform, are sitting in those pews, and you have to tell them that this is a manifestation of our living the gospels.
There is a great deal of hypocrisy on the part of the middle classes as well. Many hire illegal aliens at cheap wages to cut their lawn, watch their children, cook their meals, make their beds, and take care of their elderly parents. Anecdotal praise is lavished on Jose and Margareta during the 8-5 hours, while indifference is shown to such aliens in the off hours and on weekends. The middle classes have often achieved the perks of the former aristocracy through the cash hiring of industrious domestic laborers. The implicit attitude of this new private quasi-apartheid is that society at large picks up the social service costs of millions of illegal aliens in the off hours, while suburbanites have dependable household workers at cheap wages during the work day.
Why did illegal immigration become such a problem in the late 20th Century? Because Mexico grew poorer with growing state control of the economy. More importantly because the contrast between Mexican poverty and the affluence of the United States was glaring in the age of globalization.
Instant communications through cell phones, the Internet, and DVD's meant that millions in Mexico became aware how bad things were at home in comparative terms — and how close El Norte actually was to a Jalisco or Oaxaca. The enormous and growing American appetite for illegal drugs turned occasional smuggling into a vast billion-dollar criminal industry whose violence is now endemic on both sides of the border. Suddenly Mexico’s traditional poverty, corruption, and violence could be almost instantly exported into the United States.
Most illegal aliens are peaceful and hardworking, but the minority that is not is now more violent than ever, and operates most effectively and stealthily north of the border within large surrounding communities of Mexican nationals. Numbers matter. We have no idea of how many Mexican nationals currently reside inside the United States contrary to the law with estimates ranging from 10 to 20 million. The United States might have assimilated 100,000 new illegal arrivals, or dealt with a resident community of 2-3 million Mexican nationals. But the sheer volume of new arrivals and the enormous size of the existing alien population have resulted in virtual Mexican cities and towns all around the American landscape. In California, a Redwood City, Orange Cove or Mendota — and dozens like them — are virtually Spanish speaking, unassimilated enclaves. Yet assimilation and integration require daily contact with the so-called “other.” True diversity entails Mexican nationals interacting with blacks, Asians, and whites off the job as well, and living among, marrying within, and schooling alongside an English speaking, racially diverse population. Yet today a Mexican national can live in America nearly as if he were in Mexico. The host has lost confidence in its own values. The old notion of the desirability of the melting pot has long passed.
In theory, allowing an ethnic constituency to speak its own language, printing ballots and government information in Spanish, exaggerating the historic misdemeanors of the United States while downplaying the felonies of Mexico, and creating a hyphenated American might give confidence to new arrivals — baffled and depressed that they cannot speak English, and by the fact that they know very little of American custom and practice. In fact, such thinking has put the onus of Americanization upon the United States government rather than upon the immigrant himself. Printing information in Spanish sends the message not merely that America can facilitate Mexican nationals regardless of their legal status, but for a variety of reasons it is obligated to.
The three-strike culture of massive illegal immigration — the absence of legality, a high-school diploma, and English fluency — is a force multiplier of the poverty of millions who flee Mexico. The results ripple well into the second generation. For example, mid-1990's study found that 37% of Asian immigrants were college educated — in contrast to 3.4% of Mexican immigrants.
What can be done?
Finishing the border fence, imposing steep fines upon employers of illegal aliens, increasing border patrolling, and creating an assimilationist climate that discourages ethnic chauvinism will vastly curtail the influx. If we do these things while bickering over related issues, the pool of the illegal community will attrite due to voluntary repatriation, deportation, intermarriage, assimilation, and, in some cases, legalization. The key in the meantime would be to avoid bad ideas like a guest worker program. We forget that an entire liberal industry of protest once arose — from Woody Guthrie’s activist song, Deportee, to the CBS 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame — about the exploitation of imported foreign workers. Most guest workers would not be happy to return to Mexico permanently, just as thousands of Braceros (1942-1967) did not wish to go home either — even in an age when it was once socially acceptable to withhold a portion of their wages contingent on return to Mexico. More i portantly, the argument for guest workers is dated. Farm work used to comprise 35% of the American labor force; now it makes up just 2%. We also forget that imported cheap farm labor from Mexico helped to both depress entry-level wages for American farm workers, and tended to retard the use of labor-saving machines in agriculture.
Mass deportations — a solution favored by some hardliners — are unnecessary and, in any case, would be difficult to enact. Far better would be to deport any who are incarcerated, commit crimes, or are of recent arrival (e.g., in the last three to five years). The remaining large cohort of aliens that are employed, not on government assistance, without criminal records, and have lived in the United States for some time could pay fines, apply for citizenship or green cards, and be asked to meet minimum English language fluency and demonstrate familiarity with American civics. With the border closed, and law enforcements officials and social service workers freed to inquire about legal residence, the actual status of illegal aliens could be determined in time as residents haphazardly encounter inquisitive government officials, and their relationship with the United States is adjudicated according to various criteria.
Illegal immigration should be looked upon as a one-time perfect storm of the last half-century. To solve the problem each dimension of it needs to be systemically addressed in turn: reform of the Mexican economy, tough talk with Latin American governments, fines for employers of illegal aliens, a return to the melting pot, and a sane policy of legal immigration that emphasizes the education, skills, and diverse origins of the immigrant rather than proximity to American territory or a vague sense of historical grievance. But for now? The people of Arizona have got it right. Finish the fence, enforce the law, and leave discussion of “comprehensive immigration reform” for later. __________________
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist, military historian and political essayist. He is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book is The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
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