Tidal Wave.(Mexifornia: A State of Becoming)(Book Review)

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, by Victor Davis Hanson (Encounter, 150 pp., $21.95)

Victor Davis Hanson is a man of many parts. For five grim years he and his brothers did their best to make a profit growing grapes to dry and sell to Sun-Maid. When the California raisin industry went belly-up in 1983, Hanson returned to an old interest of his: the classics. In 1984 he founded a classics program at California State University in Fresno, where he taught the subject for nearly 20 years. He also began turning out books-among them The Western Way of War (1989), on ancient Greek infantrymen.

Then in 1998 Hanson stunned the small field of classical scholars with Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (co-authored with John Heath). The book suggested that the culprits were the people teaching the subject, most of whom, the authors charged, were awash in such modern academic aberrations as multiculturalism. The field of classics is still reeling from that one.

But it wasn't until 9/11 that Hanson swam into the consciousness of most literate Americans. Immediately thereafter he became ubiquitous, proclaiming America's military and moral strength in exhilarating articles (some for National Review). He quickly became the favorite military commentator and historian of America's conservatives.

But this author of a dozen books is far from ready to accept categorization as a military specialist. The latest book to issue from his smoking PC is Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. It is a deeply informed study of the impact of Mexican immigration on the U.S., and it will make you reflect wisely and soberly on the problems this influx is causing.

Hanson is a fifth-generation Californian from Selma, a small town not far from Fresno in the state's great Central Valley. He has watched Selma change from "a sleepy little town of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians" into "an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, almost entirely because of massive and mostly illegal immigration." The sociological impact has been enormous.

Hanson begins by asking, "What is so different about Mexican immigration?" America is, after all, a nation of immigrants. Part of the answer is simple proximity. Unlike immigrants from nations far away, Mexicans feel relatively little pressure to assimilate to the older American culture. They "migrate by simply walking across a porous border, steadily replenishing the Hispanic community in the United States with fresh aliens who strengthen ties with the world south of the border. Consequently, even after twenty years, 8 out of 10 never become naturalized American citizens."