Steyn on the Mexican intrusion into the U.S.

I can’t believe it. Mark Steyn (via Powerline) has actually made a substantive critical remark about Mexican immigration—which, first of all, he says cannot be accurately described as “immigration,” nor as “illegal immigration”:

[A] “worker class” drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of “remittances” that it’s Mexico’s largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not “immigration” at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it’s not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

This is useful. What he’s describing here is not exactly an “invasion” or “war,” as I called it in my article “The Second Mexican War,” but more like an illegitimate co-habitation of two nations. Bicultural societies, he continues, are a recipe for, at best, permanent political unhappiness:

… [A] large-scale “guest worker” class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it’s been tried. … [E]ven in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs federalists in Quebec…. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, The Washington Post’s Bob Samuelson wrote, “We face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict.”
The key words are “unnecessarily heightened,” In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most shortsighted reasons. If America’s political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 22, 2006 04:32 PM | Send