Security is not the only issue, as Fresno State classics professor Victor Davis Hanson states in his book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming . As Davis said in a C-SPAN Booknotes interview :
"My point was to convey to the Mexican immigrant community that we ourselves are schizophrenic about it. What do you do – for example, I talked to a farmer who employs illegal aliens and says, Well, nobody will work, and these people are the hardest-working people in the world, which they are. And then he says, But you know, I don`t want to go to this restaurant in Salma because – with my family because everybody takes their clothes off. They stand out in – with their boxer shorts, where the put their clothes in the washing machine. They sit there. And this is not civilized.
And I suggest to them, Well, if you pay them cash and theyre not legal citizens and they dont have the capital, then what do you expect them to do? So we`ve also created in California this aristocratic lifestyle for upper-middle-class Californians that would be not possible elsewhere, where we have literally millions of Californians whose lawns are cut by people who are here illegally from Mexico, whose children are watched, whose houses are cleaned.
But the problem with that is that these people dont just fly to Mars, as they would assume, given the wages that they get and given the status of which they enjoy, which they cant participate in the civic life of California, then we have to do something to bring – give them the advantages that we do. And that means entitlements. And we have a $38 billion deficit right now on an annual basis, and we`re starting to see the wages of that.
Theres a -- theres a cycle thats very disturbing we dont want to talk about. Somebody comes at 18 from Mexico, say from Huahaca, very young, robust male, happy. We give him $10 an hour to pour concrete. He says, This is 10 times more than I make in Mexico. Everybodys happy. But then, suddenly, were surprised when he would want to marry, have three children and get on his knees for 10 years. A knee goes out. A back goes out. An elbow goes out, and then what happens? These are no longer rite-of-passage jobs. Our children dont do them anymore. Theyre not considered a stepping stone while you learn English and gain education, but they become a perpetual job.
And then when youre 50 and youre hurt and you have a family, then your children, who have never been to Mexico, dont feel that America was such a great deal. They have no method of comparison, but they do see that their children -- excuse me -- their parents work for somebody far more affluent, and you get a range of bitterness. We have problems with graduation rates in high school. Four out of ten Mexican immigrants are not graduating, children of Mexican immigrants. Were having a problem with bachelor`s degree, only 7 percent.
And the employer then looks at this phenomenon and says, Well, dont bring somebody out who has a tattoo. Dont bring somebody out to the crew who speaks English. I want somebody from Huahaca whos a hard worker. So we just cycle people as if theyre commodities. And its really amoral, and we dont want to discuss it – left or right."
That lays it out the problem, security issues aside, very well I think.