Posted on 09/12/2004 6:04:34 AM PDT by Archangelsk
Seeptember 10, 2004
When I write that I like Mexico, that it enjoys much that we have lost, that Latin societies are more livable if less prosperous than ours, dismissive letters arrive. They amount to the same letter: “If Mexico is so great, how come they all want to come to the United States?” The writers invariably believe that they have made a telling point.
Mexico is not so great, of course. It has plenty of problems. But why do Mexicans swim the river? Money. Period. If asked, an immigrant will usually say that he seeks “una vida mejor,” a better life. He means “Money.”
Mexicans and gringos have distinctly different views of the United States. An American explaining the attractiveness of his country will usually say, “I have a big house in the suburbs, three cars, a home theater, and 300 channels on the cable. I can drink the water, and in the mall I can buy anything, absolutely anything.” He may talk of freedom and democracy, often having only the vaguest idea of whether he actually has them or what conditions might be in other countries.
A Mexican is more likely to say, “They are such a cold people. They don’t know their neighbors. They don’t know their children. They have no fiestas. Rules and being on time are more important to them than other people. They have no religion.” (To a robust Catholic, bland agnostic Protestantism isn’t detectibly a religion.) Democracy means little to an illegal with a second-grade education; in any event, Mexico is probably as democratic as the United States. He knows the government left him alone in Mexico, which is his definition of freedom. And mine.
But money counts when you don't have any. It counts a lot. And so they come whether they like the country or not. Very often they do not. This is going to matter.
Now, do the “all Mexicans” of my mail want to emigrate, to attach themselves to the northern nanny’s promiscuous dugs? No. Few do. Who then are the emigrants?
For starters, they are not doctors, chemists, and airline pilots. Successful Mexicans do not want to go to the United States. Mexicans who are merely comfortable do not want to go to the United States. They like Mexico. This is very difficult to explain to most Americans, who know beyond doubt that Mexico has lesser malls. But it is a fact.
The Mexicans who go north are the losers, the failures, the barely if at all literate, those with little to offer. They go because the Mexican economy is wretched, because the jobs that left the United States for Mexico are now leaving Mexico for China. Money. The United States can run a first-world economy. Mexico cannot. Why is debatable. The fact isn't.
While Mexicans are good people, their dregs often are not. On average the immigrants are uncultivated, uneducated, and of low intelligence. One may not mention the matter of intelligence, but it is well known among people who pay attention to such things, and has implications for the future. America is getting those Mexicans least worth getting, the least assimilable, and getting them in circumstances that do not encourage assimilation. Unlikely to prosper, they show signs of becoming another unsalvageable underclass.
Being Latins, they are not comfortable in an impersonal, technological northern European culture that values performance, competition, efficiency and punctuality. It isn’t their way. Often they plan to make money and return to Mexico; many then develop ties and remain. Yet even then they stay among their own. Their numbers as they swarm across the border are such that they can do it. If they don’t want to assimilate, don’t have to assimilate, and don’t have the wherewithal to assimilate—don’t expect assimilation.
Further, Latin Americans resent the United States for its great wealth and for their own poverty, which they tend to blame on exploitation by American corporations. Whether this characterization is correct (it isn't) doesn’t matter. The resentment does.
Mexicans know that much of the American southwest was once part of Mexico, taken from them by force of arms. Americans, having been the victors and in any case being historically illiterate, know little of this. Mexicans do. Few know the dates or the politics, yet they have a sense of grievance, a sense that these states are really theirs. They are getting them back. They know it. They view the reconquista with the relish with which they watch a Mexican soccer team beat the US.
Their envy, their sense of inferiority and of failure, breeds hostility in the southwestern barrios. This is far less true of Mexicans in Mexico. In a couple of years in the interior, I have found people to be friendly and courteous. The only exceptions, apart from my experiences during a couple of unwise forays into seriously low bars, have involved males who clearly had spent time in the US.
Comparisons are made between Mexican immigrants and, say, Italians, a Latin people who melded well into American society. A word of caution here: Assimilation is proportional to contact. When a minority population is sufficiently large, and sufficiently concentrated, the consequence is not assimilation, but the establishment of a sort of country within a country. There are for example countless huge black regions of the cities where one can go for days without seeing a white face. Whites barely know that these places exist. The inmates are not assimilating. The same appears to be happening with the Mexicans.
Perhaps as important, past immigrants have cut their ties with their native countries, and have arrived with the conscious desire of becoming Americans. Mexicans, very often, do not want to be Americans, and the mother country is right across the border. The phrase “trans-border de facto semi-sovereignty” is not Milton. It merits thought.
Worse for America, much worse, is that far too many of them perform terribly in school. Dropout rates are very high, auguring ill for the future. Mexicans are not an academic people (as, increasingly, neither are Americans). In the barrios, their Spanish is barbarous. So is their English. Crime is high. The press will not talk much about crime, but the police know.
And—here I am on statistically shaky ground, as there are no statistics—the young too often seem to be assimilating to the black underclass rather than to the central white current. Mexican machismo and the ghetto strut of the black underclass have much in common. Rap is popular among low-class Mexican males. It is the music of defiant losers, of macho swagger and rejection of white America.
Black and Mexican won’t unite. They don’t like each other. Anger will come when the growing and better organized Mexicans take the southwestern cities from the blacks. One country, three nations, little compatibility, and no love lost.
This is not really a change in subject -
There is now a small window of opportunity to destroy what the Moslem world has been for all these centuries. Since "modernity", for lack of a better term, has destroyed us - though the majority of Americans (willfully dumb as rocks) will not see this until events force awareness - we have a generation or so to infect the Moslem world with the same cancer. This project is well underway. Might work, too.
Hope we can disagree without being disagreeable.
If you have not read the quote about "huddled masses" lately maybe you should try a book. If you are into reading you might try a conservative like Octavio Paz. Then you will understand admiration instead of anger.
too bad guys like you don't actually read the Rules on Free Repbulic i.e NO personal attacks. Too bad you can't disagree without being disagreeable.
Its simple you have taken some abstract political rhetoric and created a religous belief out of it. If they were so hard working why is their home country such a dump, if they were so valuable why is their country so mismanaged? I simply doubt this Paz is an American conservative because if he was or is this "huddled masses" nonsense comes straight out of liberal Politics 101 of Victimization. Scenario two, you are some ethnic hustler simply gaming the system.
Here is something about this 1990 Nobel prize winner: Disgusted with Stalinism, Paz had rejected the Left by the time the Cold War began [that would be 1950 for you my history callenged Free Republic reader]. Language became Paz's central concern. "I think that for intellectuals, politics has replaced ideology and to some extent religion,"
Like David Horowitz, PAZ writes with passion and style that gets through to a huge market of Latin people who want freedom. He wrote about work and democracy long before you found your hands on computer.
I for one can tell the difference between a man from Mexico and one from Chile, it is not about their Latin sounding name.
As to being a race hustler - those are the chicken ___, comments of someone in the RAT party not worthy of someone who might have worn a uniform and earned the right (as Zell said in his speech) to make a comment about Huddled Masses!! Wait I'm the one who wore the uniform.
Actually, there are a lot of people who think we could use immigration but from Europe only.
Europe doesn't have people to send, they need to stay home and fix up their own countries and it was massive immigration from Europe that brought us socialist ideas and unions. The problem with massive immigration, it's purpose is to keep wages very low -- and the only way wages rise so that people can have that better life they were seeking is for employers to have to compete for labor or by unions. In the late 1800s after massive immigration, unions took a big hold and union protests were very violent.
If Mexicans are so conservative, they need to work on bringing about conservativism in Mexico --- leaving by the millions isn't doing a thing for those left behind --- at some point someone needs to stay and bring about positive change back home -- that kind of change would benefit far more people -- right now Mexico looks like a sinking ship that people are only trying to flee --- but Mexico with it's vast natural resourses shouldn't look the way it does. There is real no reason that prosperity ends when you reach the Rio Grande.
Octavio Paz was pointing out to them what a mistake socialism and communism are AND many of the Mexicans that have moved to America have become very conservative after they see what a benefit the values of a conservative do for their lifestyle.
I think that the worst piece of their history is that Fox has spent more time on security reform - with modest results, as witnessed in the March of the People in White (300,000 ) against kidnappings and corruption. He looked like he might bring some business - conservative values to their body politic.
It's interesting because they just have a very different culture and values -- depending on the social class of course. The most conservative, traditional kind of Mexican we usually see here -- coming here illegally can tell you about growing up on an ejido. That was their traditional lifestyle back home --- communally owned property but with some private ownership of crops and animals. The idea of privately owned land is pretty new to most and I think that's one of the problems and why immigration is so high. When they privatized some of the ejidos, the new owners saw a chance to see some money and sold them. Now they don't have their ejido and they don't have a job and had to come here.
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