Victor Davis HansonInterviewed by the Swedish newspaper Junge Freiheit ..here's a tease
JF: Professor Hanson, you criticize U.S. immigration policy in your recent book Mexifornia. What is it that bothers you about the development at the Southern border?
VDH: Many things. 1)We are wide open to terrorist infiltration; 2) We privilege illegal immigration from Mexico, while penalizing and delaying legal immigration from Asia, Africa, and Europe; 3) We serve as a safety valve and enabler for Mexico, which therefore will never make needed reforms; 4) We are creating a chauvinistic tribalism, a race industry that tries to convert the presence of 15 million illegal aliens into some sort of political movement; 5) We use cheap illegal labor to ensure our own entry level workers cannot bargain or organize.
As you see, I could go on ad nauseam.
JF: The U.S. did steal Texas from the Mexicans in the 19th century. Isn’t there a certain justice in what is happening now, the land being gradually reclaimed by its original owners?
VDH: In the sense of the irony that Mexico stole its land from Spain, that stole it from the Indians. Though unlike Mexico, the U.S. legitimized its forced annexation through a treaty and payment. There surely is irony on all sides that long ago mobs of European Texans encroached on Mexican land and now their descendants face the same from Mexicans. That said, the greatest irony is the majority of Mexican citizens in Mexico who poll that (1) they think the southwestern U.S. really belongs to Mexico, and (2), the majority of such respondents still wish to leave Mexico and emigrate to the U.S.: the subtext being ‚we want the status and prestige of being Mexico, but don’t wish to live in what we subsequently create.’
