Every day thousands of illegals stream across the 2,500 miles of border with Mexico. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, the total number of illegals in America from this source increases by 275,000 annually. Already the United States is host to an illegal population of 7 to 12 million, of whom the vast majority are Mexican or Hispanic in origin. These illegal and uninvited guests help themselves to jobs, education, welfare and unemployment compensation. The many whose wages are paid under the table pay little or no taxes. And they are easy prey for unscrupulous employers and politicians. What a new president and Congress decide to do about this when they take office in January 2001 matters a great deal.
Despite the soothing reassurances of the liberal left -- that America is a nation of immigrants, and illegal immigrants are just more of the same -- all the signs suggest the opposite.Item: Across the six states of the American Southwest are colleges and universities teaching Chicano studies, the core argument of which is that the Southwest was taken illegally by the United States during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, and that these states should now secede from the Union to create a new, Mexican-based nation, "Aztlan." The most widely used text in these programs, Rodolfo Acuna's Occupied America, calls the Mexican-American War "as vicious as that of Hitler's invasion of Poland" and shows a map of Mexico stretching up as far as Kansas. Hundreds of thousands of American college students, including many young Mexican-Americans, have absorbed this political indoctrination.
Item: In a study conducted in 1994, then-governor of California Pete Wilson discovered that the cost of illegals to California, in unemployment, medical, educational and other services, was more than $4 billion annually. California's Proposition 187, which passed in the wake of this study, prohibited most public benefits to illegals, including education, but was overturned by the courts in 1998.
Item: In California and Arizona, thousands of illegal Mexicans work six months in one state while collecting unemployment in the other and then move to the second to collect unemployment from the first.
Item: The U.S. Border Patrol is undermanned. In 1998, while supporters of the Patrol in Congress were calling for a fourfold increase, the White House budget proposed for fiscal 1999 contained no money at all for additional agents.
Item: Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Douglas, Ariz., is the largest staging ground for illegal immigration into the United States anywhere on the border. From campgrounds spread along several miles, well over 1,000 illegals cross into the United States every night of the year.
To compound matters many of the new immigrants are assimilating slowly or not all. As demonstrated by Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation (1996), waves of new settlers in the 19th century were willing to learn English and become a part of America, while periods of 40 to 50 years intervened between each wave to allow assimilation. But these factors are not present for illegals from Mexico, frustrating the normal process of political assimilation.
That process is further frustrated by several powerful actors and groups:
* The government of Mexico. Mexicans illegally in the United States repatriate millions of dollars annually to Mexico, a real boost for the government. Vicente Fox, the newly elected president of Mexico, flagrantly campaigned for Mexican votes in Southern California among legal and illegal Mexicans and at his first press conference called for unrestricted labor migration into the United States;
* American businessmen and lobbies. A ganglion of diverse interests exists to defend illegal immigration at every turn. Environmentalists protest the building of a fence to keep illegals out. Businessmen and suburban home owners want a cheap labor supply that can't be unionized. In June a newspaper in northern San Diego County called for dismantling the Border Patrol's checkpoint on Interstate 15 because it delays suburbanites on their drive home; and
* The philosophers of multiculturalism. Without overtly advocating legal or illegal immigration, multiculturalism supports all the aspects of sustained nonassimilation. It views bilingual teaching, mass rallies flying Mexican flags, and the demand for the return of lands to La Raza, as cultural justice, not political mischief.
Do we have control of our border with Mexico? Clearly, no. Should we clamp down? Obviously, yes. The United States may have its own Quebec problem soon: a rapidly growing minority, many of whom are present illegally in the country, insistent on keeping their own cultural identity and supported by the liberal establishment.
In the 1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower, faced with large numbers of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande illegally, sent troops to the Mexican border. In six months Operation Wetback ended the problem. Do we dare take any kind of effective action again -- or does the border, and with it American sovereignty, already belong to Mexico?
Ted Hayes has been an instructor in political science at the University of California at Berkeley and writes on politics and culture from San Diego.
