Back to basics

We frequently link to Victor Davis Hanson when it comes to national security affairs. But Hanson is also the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, and thus is well qualified to opine on President Bush’s recent immigration proposal. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Hanson gives the proposal the thumbs down. He believes that “once the U.S. government commits its good name and legal capital to regulate, rather than end, the current chaos, a number of contradictions will arise that will only make things. . .worse.” For example, illegal aliens will continue to enter our country either to work for employers who wish to follow the old, exploitative non-system or simply to escape the bleak landscape of central Mexico even with no job waiting for them here. Hanson also doubts, as many do, that our traditional melting pot will remain viable “in an age of growing ethnic chauvinism that sees unassimilated and often exploited workers in the shadows as an oppressed constituency needing group, rather than individual representation.”
Hanson calls for a return to basics when it comes to immigration: set a realistic figure for legal immigration from Mexico and then enforce our border controls; apply stiff employer sanctions; deport those who now break the law; and return to social and cultural protocols that promote national unity through assimilation and integration.” But do we have the will to carry out that agenda?