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The bottom line is that the economic gap between immigrants and native workers is wider today than it was a century ago. One grim measure of this, according to Jencks, is that California now has the lowest rate of home ownership in the nation.

Mr. Wilson was doing so well up until that. No, Mr. Wilson you can't blame racism or xenophobia. There's the little matter of the eco-wackos. You cannot build freely to meet demands. By freely I do not mean willy-nilly. Despite California's sub-basement economy real estate prices continue to climb. Mr. Wilson worries about the poor ILLEGAL immigrant -- well, I doubt if more than a third of Californians have the income to support buying a home in their community. The number is far less in the S.F. Bay area.

only a little over one-fifth of Mexican immigrants become American citizens.

This doesn't just happen. Most are ILLEGAL and besides the Mexican government actively promotes loyalty to Mexcio in their "Nation without borders." Besides neither of our Political parties cares if they are legal or not.

And still another puzzle is whether the imported familial culture of poor, rural Mexicans can be expected to adapt to America as rapidly as the urban culture of Asians and Europeans. It would have been helpful if Hanson had developed these ideas; perhaps in his next book?

What a silly statement! Prior waves of immigrants -- including Latino came here LEGALLY and they wanted to be Americans! That is how they adapted, stupid!

If you want to be "respectable" to the liberal establishment you can't tell the truth. Victor Hanson is respectable.

The right decision, he says, would be to maintain our traditional commitment to assimilation. For two centuries, we turned immigrants into Americans; whatever their family heritage or religious orientation, they became people who spoke English, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, worked hard in school, learned American history, accepted American culture, and joined the American workforce.
As I've said over and over on this forum, there is no such thing as assimilation, only amalgamation, ar least when the numbers exceed a certain low level, and especially when the parts to be amalgamated are radically different. The Europeans who immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th century didn't "turn . . .into Americans", they changed America, generally for the worse. They brought radical politics to these shores and for decades a large percentage, if not the majority, of members of radical political organizations and movements were comprised of these immigrants or their children. (One of the reasons for restricting immigration in the 1920s was a reaction to several decades of political violence that included numerous bombings and the assassination of at least one president.) There is a direct line between that immigration wave and the revolution of the 1960s. If that wave of Europeans brought us the earthquake of the 60s what will this one bring?

like Mexican workers—they may not speak much English, but they work harder and more dependably than native workers in the same jobs.

This is true only of some --- not the majority. It's kind of joke here where there are many employees from Mexico -- they take more time off than everyone and they really aren't the most dependable workers --- many of the maquila managers are finding out the same thing. Absenteeism and workplace drug use are very high in Mexican maquilas.

The central issue raised by Mexifornia is whether Mexican-Americans should be viewed as an ethnic group aspiring for assimilation or a racial group maintaining a separate identity.

There's no question. It's pretty obvious.

They are not here to assimilate.

Mexifornia is gone. The rest of the SW must hold ground, or we're going down too.