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Posted on 05/26/2006 5:34:23 AM PDT by Tolik
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 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.
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.
Zealots may chant ÁSi, 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 the entered a new world of immigration without precedent. This current crisis is unlike the great waves of 19th-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 U.S. 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.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
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This has become routine in my small southern city.
The local press won't report it, so it's up to talk radio to cover the subject.
The daughter of a friend of mine was T-boned at the Palmetto Cemetary intersection- she wasn't hurt, but her car was totaled. The driver and all passengers bailed out of their car and ran away.
The police claimed "there's nothing we can do about it."
Their attitude baffles me- there is a paper trail associated with any vehicle- the last owner to license and insure it, if nothing else. He has to know who he sold it to, even if they neglected to get a plate and insurance.
"I'm here to tag my new car. My old car got totalled the other day.
The other guy jumped out of his car and ran away. Cops haven't caught him.
Probably illegal."
That's what a fellow standing in line with me at the DMV in Los Angeles
(on Cloverfield in West LA/Santa Monica area) told me when I was getting my
CA license in 1995.
Bttt
Poignant article.
Absolute slam dunk. Home run.
Many immigrants end up sending money back to Mexico, while suckling at the teat of the US and state government for health care, schooling, food stamps, etc, etc. Until there is an disincentive to not send money back to the "old country", and folks are absorbed into the American melting pot, there problem will continue to get worse. Of all the possible writings, I think Dr. Hansons's writings on the immigration problem are the best, and his solution seems reasonable.
No such luck. The federal government is immune from tort suits -- unless they volunteer to be sued.
How about individual suits? I saw an episode of BOSTON LEGAL last month where a foreigner sued the government...so..why can't I?
What if someone who has lost a husband or wife to an illegal alien suing the government for not doing their job of controlling the border?
I'm not a scriptwriter for Boston Legal, or anytbing...
BTTT and later read.
Or perhaps out of greed -- or a lack of understanding that there's no free lunch -- or perhaps an inability to look beyond a short term gain to see the long term disaster. Perhaps, indeed.
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