Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson

reasons that they are in the fields and the kitchens and we are not, and the fact that they are better off than they were before are in one sense irrelevant; for they will still pick and scrub while we do not, and for them that makes all the difference in the world.
    In short, this illegal alien business is a hazardous odyssey in America, replete with modern-day Sirens and Cyclopes that can lure the immigrant onto the rocky coast or even eat him outright. A few deftly navigate their way home, but more, increasingly, flounder on our shores.
     
    THREE
    The Mind of the Host
    Most Americans avoid unskilled routine labor. It is not that we are lazy. No one, in fact, works harder than we do. Europeans and Japanese labor far fewer hours each year. Even our office workers are exhausted: there is something especially stressful and unhealthful about sitting inside a carpeted office forty hours a week between artificially cooled and heated sheet-rock walls, dealing with numbers and names flittering across a computer screen.
    Still, most of us are wise to the pitfalls of our own system. We realize that there is a "future" in the antiseptic high-tech office, while being the fourth man on a cement crew or making beds all day is a dead-end job - perhaps permissible as a way of initiating youth into the values of discipline and hard work, but after the age of twenty a growing guarantee of failure in America, in terms of both achieving fiscal security and keeping an aging body healthy. Getting cash wages off the books is not a sustainable proposition, even for our young with good joints. The compensation for menial labor brings entertainment and occasional gadgetry for the single young male, but seldom results in a house, two good cars, and adequate clothes and sustenance for a wife and kids.
    Because everyone has hands and feet, however, we believe that menial or stoop labor can be done by anyone with the proper resignation and permanently lowered ambition. Increasingly we realize that our own children cannot or will not do such tasks as part of their growing up, so we basically cover our ears and eyes, and let others do what they must. Thus we ignored the sudden entry of millions of rural Mexican poor. But what at first was a relief became a troubling dilemma, and is now a near-disaster.
    We all can become hypocritical and at times amoral, admiring illegal aliens as individuals - housekeepers, gardeners, kids' friends - but feeling less kindly when we see them in long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or scan their pictures in newspaper ads for Crime Stoppers or reports from the police blotter.
    I start with impressions gained from observing the roadside in front of my vineyard. There are five stretches of replanted vines. I habitually replant vines. As part of that task I also put in new stakes and patch wire. I also fish out cars of inebriated illegal aliens - five now in twenty years. I own a very small frontage on an underused rural avenue, so I cannot help but assume that the phenomenon of illegals leaving the road at high speed is surely widespread. There is an unwavering pattern in all five crashes on my land. A large Crown Victoria or Buick Le Sabre of decade-old vintage veers off the road at seventy miles per hour, ploughs through the vineyard and comes to a halt three or four rows in from the asphalt. The vine canes, stakes and wire serve as a cushion for the driver, who is never seriously injured. By the time I reach the scene, he has hobbled off through the vineyard - leaving beer cans, his crushed car, and $5,000 in ruined vines. The car was practically worthless, but now is totaled and less than worthless -   and of course without license and registration.
    The California Highway Patrol arrives two hours later to impound the wreck for the price of towing it away. If I am particularly upset, I make a follow-up call and learn from the official accident report that the crushed Impala had either nonexistent or fraudulent