Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson © 2003 Published by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit tax exempt corporation. The following excerpts appear on pages 36-59.

The Universe of the Illegal Alien

There are thousands of idle American teenagers at the mall every summer; others are lounging on the couch, while some are hard at work in computer camp.  But so far I have not seen a single one employed in a vineyard or an orchard, whose owners instead use – and probably prefer – labor from Mexico to prevent their soft fruit, and so their livelihoods, from rotting.  The U.S. Department of Labor reports that in July 2002, at a time of recession, less than half of America's teenagers were looking for summer employment – the lowest percentage since it began compiling statistics on youth job rates.  In other words, millions of Americans are not working seasonal jobs that millions of Mexicans desperately want.  There is something deeply ingrained now in the American character saying that Josh should not spend June and July in a chicken-packing plant.  Nor must Nicole be sewing casual wear between spring and fall semesters as a temporary seamstress in a garment sweat shop.

In the late 1990s, after reading dozens of stories in our local paper about a severe shortage of grape pickers – and then witnessing firsthand that the raisin harvest was a week or two behind because too many farmers were seeking too few workers – I once drove to the three largest shopping centers in Fresno.  The labor pool there was astounding!  There were easily two or three thousand healthy men and women under twenty – shopping, loitering, idling, chatting on cell phones and flirting at 2 P.M. on a summer weekday.  Some had cultivated physiques with bulging muscles and were well tanned, appearing to my mind more than ready for the rough outdoors of the vineyard.

There were enough Americans within a ten-mile vicinity who had the strength and health to pick all the grapes on seven or eight hundred acres of vineyard in a single day.  But as Napoleon said of war, the will is to the matériel as three is to one.  Not one of those young men and women works in the fields.  Their parents may complain about how expensive their school clothes and electronic appurtenances are, but still unleash them to the malls, while the farmers gripe that nobody wants their wages to do hard, honest work, even as the Mexicans are happy to do what others will not, and thereby earn the money to buy what others purchase through parental subsidy.

Ban our yearly contingent of tough, lean Mexican immigrants completely from California tomorrow, and I think within a year or two the state would be almost paralyzed – much of its food decaying, its hotels dirty, its dishes unwashed, its lawns and shrubs weedy and unkempt.  Remove the young Mexicans and our professional classes would learn rather quickly that fruit does not fall edible from trees, that the grass does indeed continue to grow, and that trenches do not open of their own accord like the Red Sea.  Dozens of agricultural magnates I know have never themselves – much less their children – picked any peaches from their thousands of tree, never sprayed organophosphates on their vast orchards, and never even mowed their own lawns.  In the great debate now going on about immigration, it seems to me vital that critics of Mexican illegal aliens at least experiment – if only for forty-eight hours or so – with working at such helotage.  They might serve as maids for a day at the Motel 6, or pick strawberries to understand the issue of stoop labor, its compensation, and why people who wish to work find in America work that Americans will not do.  We must keep in mind that unlike the 1950s, when only the elite in our country had someone else tend their lawns and baby-sit their kids, now millions of the middle and upper-middle classes pay aliens for such services – a radical change in the American lifestyle made possible by the arrival of millions from Mexico in the last decades.

So at a personal level, whether the present massive immigration is good or bad sometimes depends on whether your lawn is being moved cheaply, or you are mowing someone else's; whether you show up at the emergency room for thousands of dollars in free maternity care, or pay the highest state taxes in the country to provide care for someone who either cannot or will not acquire health insurance; whether you believe that we are all going to be fine because an illegal alien becomes valedictorian of his highschool class, or that none of us will have a future when almost four out of every ten Hispanic students – natives, resident aliens and illegal immigrants alike – are believed never to finish the twelfth grade.

As we contemplate this growing complexity, it is worth considering the world as it appears to the illegal alien – a cosmos that I know something about as one who has worked in orchards and vineyards side by side with farm workers for much of his life.  One thing this alien knows in his heart: There is a simple reason why Americans do not do farm work, one that transcends even the absence of real money and any status.  It is physically hard to pick peaches all day.  The twelve-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches sixty or seventy times a day and then descend with fifty pounds of peaches strapped to your belly.  Our knees, backs and shoulders are not designed for such work.  Still, you tend to run rather than walk at work because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a nine-hour shift – if the trees are of moderate size, the fruit to be stripped rather than color-picked, and the orchard relatively clean of noxious weeds.  That you are one ladder-fall away from the poverty that ensues from a slipped disk or inches from a moving tractor tire and snapped leg are dangers to be ignored if you are to work well and profitably.  The dilemma of farm work was never that it was necessarily low-paid, but rather that it offered good wages on the condition that one was young, healthy and able to move on to something better before old age and infirmity set in.

It can easily reach 110 degrees in a peach orchard in the Central Valley of California.  The effects of summer temperature are made worse by the tall grass, the lack of any breeze, and the humidity of the stifling grove.  There are other occupational hazards – besides the minor irritants of peach fuzz, dehydration, a rare black widow spider, and foxtails and puncture vines in your socks and shoes.  Sometimes the labor contractor can withhold your check without cause, or deduct 30 percent of it for Cokes, rides to work, and everything between.

The trabajador lives and works in a world of young men.  They survive for the most part as small teams, under conditions of illegality, apart from their families, and are prone to settle disagreements with knives and worse.  Cash – for drinks, a ride, lunch and laundry – is needed daily, even hourly.  Most agricultural laborers carry their wages in fat wads in their front pocket.  We should never forget that as a rule, illegal aliens come as single young males (solos) – and in the history of civilization it is single, transient young men who build bridges and roads, but also bring societies their crime and violence.

Worse are the meth labs that seem to spring up throughout rural California – the nation's drug capital for do-it-yourself chemists.  Workers in these operations can make thousands of dollars in a summer.  Such potential profits explain why the drug is ubiquitous on our streets and why aliens who use and sell it are cramming our prisons.  Unlike the heroin or cocaine trade, meth is particularly attractive to the rural immigrant.  It is usually concocted among familiar trees and vines, in a rented barn or shed miles from town, where the immigration authorities and sheriffs rarely intrude.  It is a natural outdoor activity ancillary to farm work, likewise conducted in solitude and with the same network of smugglers and contractors known from the illegal trek into the United States.  On two occasions, tough-looking men have shown up in my yard inquiring about renting my barn as a future "dormitory" for workers – code for a drug-making lab.  If a man is here illegally and living in a stealthy world to being with, having come from a culture where drug dealing and manufacturing are endemic among the bureaucrats and the police, then the occasional straying from the vineyard to the lab need not be so radically defined in Manichean terms of good versus evil.  One year of drug chemistry might earn an illegal alien $40,000 in cash, and give him the much-sought-after victorious return to Mexico in a way farm wages never can; or, contrarily, it can earn him twenty years in Folsom Prison, a body illustrated with tattoos, and lifelong membership in a Mexican prison gang.

Despite the dangers and drudgery, however, the wage for menial labor in America is far better than anything earned in Mexico.  An unskilled laborer from the Sierra Madre is lucky to make $25 a week; in California he can easily earn nearly $10 an hour and often more.  To the worker, the initial realization that there is such an El Dorado is dazzling, quite unbelievable.  Young males under thirty years of age in their first tour of duty in America seem starved for work.  They toil ten hours a day – amazed that they have more money in their wallets in a week than they once had in an entire year.

I sometimes think that only the vast contrast with Mexico keeps the illegal alien in America alive; only the memory of the former harshness of real hunger, dirt floors, untreated illnesses and outdoor privies in Mexico steels him for what he must face in America.  I once asked two raisin-tray rollers how they felt after ten hours of labor on their knees in 110-degree weather – "Better than in Mexico," one said.  I thought to myself, "Well better than in hell too, I suppose."  I paid them $100 each, but noticed that their car's starter was just about out, and figured they had rolled all day for the cost of getting home.

To talk with these young men is to hear of extravagant dreams – all culminating in a grand and permanent return to their village in central or southern Mexico: a ranchero, a new block house, two Chevy pickups, alligator boots, black felt hat, jewelry – all the Mexican signs of material success in America.  Of course, the university activists who see themselves as illegals' advocates ridicule such notions of instant wealth as impossible to garner through unskilled labor.  But they err in two ways: Much of the wages for yard work, cement, roofing and farming is paid on a cash basis, without the deductions for Social Security, Medicare, workman's compensation, state and federal taxes – the miasma of debits that easily can shrink an American's paycheck by a third to a half.  Our young professors at California State University, Fresno, some with Ph.D.s from Berkeley and Stanford, will be lucky to take home $2,000 a month after deductions – appearing on the pay stub in some ten categories including state, federal, Social Security and Medicare taxes, health, dental and vision insurance fees, state retirement, parking and union dues.  Some undocumented workers in construction can put in 200 hours of work per month, and at $10 cash per hour they match the English professor – without the tie, the decade's worth of degrees, the need to master the lingo of postmodernism, and the entire drain of life insurance, lawn care and braces for the kids.

Second, there is the much-remarked-upon gulf between the cost of living in California and the cost of surviving in rural Mexico.  Everything from tortillas to changing a tire is a fraction of the price south of the border.  If the campesino can go south with a van full of consumer goods unavailable cheaply in Mexico – stereos, cell phones, televisions, washers and dryers – the daily tab to eat, sleep and relax in his home pueblo is otherwise rather low.  The dream of the young worker, then, is that he might earn money as a Mexican in America and then go home to live like an American in Mexico.

When the alien can no longer stucco a house or plaster a pool, most contractors must turn him loose – falsely confident that all those years of expensive deductions and bothersome paperwork should at least pay for workman's compensation, state disability, Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, unemployment or some other government dole that will keep a tired Manuel or an ill Ramon alive.  Most aliens in their fifties and sixties who are worn out, obese, diabetic, alcoholic or injured stay indoors, do indeed live on some sort of assistance, and venture out for a day or two each week to pick a few plums, lay four yards of concrete, or dig some trenches for cash between afternoon cartoons and Oprah.  Drive into any central California town at 11 A.M. and you will see hundreds of adult males walking the sidewalks, sitting in cafes, milling around at the stores, or loitering in front of their apartments – all of them not working, all of them on some sort of donation, and most of them wounded veterans of some of the hardest jobs in America.  Our government says that local Central Valley towns experience a 15 percent unemployment rate.  The naked eye suggests instead that a quarter of the populace lacks a full-time job.

Meanwhile, America needs replacements for these undecorated veterans.  Thus an entire new cohort comes north to renew this strange, unspoken cycle in the traffic of humankind.  In almost every city in California, there is a familiar street, park or lumber yard parking lot where dozens of healthy Mexican men, fifteen to thirty years of age, congregate to hire themselves out for a day as laborers – hoping that a contractor will bid well for ten hours' use of their backs.  Because we are an instinctual, rather than an explicitly expressive, society, we have no placards on the border – something like the entryway admonishment of Dante's Inferno – to warn the newcomer.

Beware all you who would enter.  Here are the rules: You are welcome to work hard between twenty and forty.  But then please retire at fifty and return home.  Stay young, healthy, single, sterile and lawful – and we want you; get old or injured, marry, procreate or break the law – and we don't.

There has never been a more affluent society in the history of civilization than is America of the early twenty-first century.  I would wager that an illegal alien in America may have more buying power in his pocket than a subsidized university student in Athens or Oslo.  Our own new American robber barons may live on islands, rig the stock market and represent greed incarnate, but something is definitely trickling down from their malfeasance.  In Selma I see vast new housing developments for newly arrived Mexicans; they cram the fast food outlets and carry computers out from Office Max.

In global terms – compared with life in the Congo, Cambodia, Yemen or Bolivia – illegal aliens in California are not materially poor.  They may not have HMOs, but they are treated at emergency rooms.  Their houses may not yet be three-bedroom, two-bath, but their apartments have carpeting, air conditioners, heaters and appliances.

Aliens are also consummate and generous buyers, not overly cost-conscious, and far more affable in the store than affluent white or Korean shoppers.  For years I peddled my fruit at farmers' markets in Carmel and Santa Cruz.  As a crass generalization, the Asians and whites complained about the price, demanded samples and seemed always to eat at least one fig or plum without paying.  Monterey Bay housewives wanted special discounts for their lavish dinner parties.  They asked a litany of questions about sprays, fertilizers and farming techniques – all as a prerequisite for buying $2 worth of tomatoes.

But Mexican shoppers who spoke broken English?  They came up silently, put twenty pounds of fruit and vegetables in a bag, joked about picking such produce themselves, and then slapped down a wad of bills (always cash, never checks of dubious trust) – never complaining about the quality of the produce, the price, or their own poverty.  Had they been dressed in white pants, deck shoes and chic sunglasses – and the Carmelites in garish, glittery shirts and cheap polyester pants – you would have thought the aliens were the munificent gentry, the Monterey Hills crowd the boorish poor.  For a man who works on his knees, food is simply fuel – not an aesthetic experience, not an occasion to present an impressive table for discriminating peers, and not part of a holistic health program that prays for longevity.

There is another type of impoverishment, which I can also attest to from my own life between 1980 and 1985.  Then in my late twenties and early thirties I never made more than $10,000 a year as a full-time farmer, despite two children in diapers and a wife who labored to carry the laundry from a creaking farmhouse to a jerry-rigged washer in the shed.  The immobility of such a rooted existence, without disposable income of any great quantity, created a poverty of dwindling expectations.  All the material goods in the world cannot disguise the fact that you are chained to your environs.  You can have an ample beer belly and still feel hungry if your four walls constitute a monotonous landscape.  For the immigrant there is a trip to Mexico perhaps, or two days in Disneyland just maybe via a Greyhound bus, but the alien knows he can never really buy a Winnebago or fly off to pick up a cruise to the inland passage.  To enjoy the good life of the California native, this man would have to make $50 an hour hammering shingles and have 1.5 children, not six.

The world that the alien sees on the magazine rack in Safeway – Martha Stewart's flagstone patios, the Greek islands of Traveler magazine, the glossy ads for summers in the Sierra cabin – all that might as well be a glimmering on Venus.  The alien senses that there is a vague, though very nice universe somewhere nearby where wealthy white and Asian people go – and where he never will.  And that inexperience with travel, new landscapes, exotic people – a blinkered existence of never straying more than a few miles from home that most of the six billion people on the planet grudgingly accept as their birthright – can be hard to stomach in America when so many come and go as they please.  There really is more to life than bread and circuses.

Those who have not worked for low wages at exhausting jobs without respite or escape cannot be expected to understand the growing sense of despair that leads to helplessness and real bitterness among those so much better off than they once were in Mexico.  But when you are tied to your trowel or your pruning shears, the world even in America can seem an unfair place.  Again, all the mature acceptance of truth in the world – life is still far better than it was in Mexico, one is free to make money and go to school and incrementally better his lot here – does not mitigate the perception that others have so much freedom while you have so little and will die with so little.

When I drove a dirty diesel tractor with spray rig hours on end, I would wonder at the insurance agents, pesticide salesmen and agribusiness representatives in immaculate clothes who drove out to our vineyard in air-conditioned cars and had the freedom to chat on their company's time.  How and why, I worried in my immaturity, when a man sweats and works so hard, does he make so little, when another who is clean, fresh and seemingly listless can make so much more?  Lectures about complex economies, the delegation of authority, rare skills and education, control and use of capital, free will and responsibility – all that wisdom means little if you are on the hot tractor and someone else is in the cool Lexus.

Read here about the fallacy of Chicano liberation.

Interviews:
Kathryn Jean Lopez in the National Review

Book Reviews:
Emily Cochran of Town Hall
Walter A. Ewing of the American Immigration Law Foundation
John Fonte of the Hudson Institute
William A. Rusher in the National Review