Some years ago, with the publication of my first book, I became notorious in certain American academic quarters for my opposition to bilingual education and my celebration of assimilation—the child’s coming to think of himself as belonging within a society of strangers.

I retain my belief in the necessity of a common American culture. But I am lately appalled by voices raised in this country against Mexican migrant workers.

Americans have tended to abrogate to economists the question of the costs and the benefits of illegal immigration. But, surely, beyond how much Betsy Ross is willing to pay for a head of lettuce, there is the question of morality, there is the question of Mexico. How much of Mexico are we willing to take within our borders? I believe the question might better be asked of a theologian, than an economist.

Mexico is a society formed by an incursion into the New World of the Spanish Catholic counter-reformation. America is a society formed by the flight from England of low-church Protestants.

Mexicans are a cynical people, you will find—sweet, but cynical. Their cynicism derives from the notion of Original Sin and the sense that humans fail inevitably. Mexicans are patient with this knowledge, charmingly so in some instances (lard, beer), dangerously so in other instances, as when Mexicans tolerate civic corruption. It is no coincidence that Mexican border towns have become the fiefdoms of drug lords.

Americans are a hypocritical people—nice people, but hypocritical. Americans prefer unknowing. They believe innocence clings to them by election. Americans prefer to ignore the correlation between our need for drugs and the creation of a vast criminal economy that stretches from Afghanistan to Bolivia to Tijuana.

Mexico represents a special annoyance to the United States because of proximity; because Mexico is forthright in reminding America of the corruption of our past. In the 19th century, Americans were illegal immigrants into Mexican territory. The United States stole the Southwest from Mexico because the United States wanted the Southwest, a desire we unrolled with great mumbo-jumbo and called Manifest Destiny. Everything Americans want to say about illegal immigrants today, history can also say about us.

From his minaret in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Samuel P. Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor at Harvard, peers across the brown Charles River and trembles for the future of America. Professor Huntington is most famously a phrase-maker. His famous phrase was the title of his book, The Clash of Civilizations—the book that gave the world a simplistic, albeit thrillingly dark, description of an intransigence between the secular West and the Islamist East. September 11th made the professor a prophet.

In his latest book, Who Are We?, Huntington describes an America under siege from Latin American immigrants. His America is a kind of little England, a demi-demi Eden with pudding for dessert and “Masterpiece Theatre.” Forget the French Revolution; forget the Dutch; forget Spain, obviously; forget the Massachusetts Indians who rescued the Puritans from winter; forget the African slaves who created the wealth of a young nation. According to Professor Huntington, “Anglo-Protestant culture has been central to American identity.” There are no ironies in Professor Huntington’s America. There are no ironies because there are no dialectical meetings. There can be none. America was settled by the British, and British it should remain.

I suppose I object to Huntington’s nativism more as a Roman Catholic than as a Mexican-American. Even so, as a Mexican American I roll my eyes when Huntington credits England with the American work ethic and implies that a darker race is incapable of equal industry.

The American objection raised against illegal Mexican workers—notably from the economist George Borjas; from C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans—acknowledges the fierce energy of Mexican laborers, a work ethic that undermines the wages of the native working class, and that is outperforming the native working class.

Another academic, Victor Davis Hanson, distinguishes himself among disgruntled white voices from the nativist bookshelf, because he is a farmer. Hanson has worked alongside Mexican peasants in California. He knows the fury of their labor. Hanson grouses when a drunk Mexican kid runs a car into a ditch on Hanson’s property and abandons it there—a scene John Steinbeck would have treated as tragic and comic. Hanson sees just another mess to clean up. He is not wrong. He is ungenerous.

John Steinbeck had a generous heart. In The Grapes of Wrath he describes California’s moral outrage against the Okies:

Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.

Hanson doesn’t see beyond his own grievance, nevertheless Hanson sees clearly enough that America’s native born children—the white and the brown who prowl the mall in Fresno in tank tops and on cells—are incapable of matching the Mexican’s toil because they do not feel the Mexican’s desperation.

Without exactly intending to do so, Hanson reminds me that the debate over illegal immigration will end up less concerned with the virtues of the Mexican peasant worker than with the worker’s Americanized children who rush to take on all the demerits of America; who are, in fact, American children.

Rather than credit our American work habit to England or to Calvin, we might better wonder why it is we still describe America only by reference to Reformation England and Royalist Spain (as I shall proceed to do here). Mexican Americans have the bad but telling habit of naming gringos “Anglos.” So-called Anglos name Mexican Americans “Hispanics.”

Hispanic. In all the video footage I have seen of people crossing illegally from Mexico, of people arrested, the faces look more Indian than Spanish. Most of the illegal immigrants from Mexico may be mestizo, racially, but Indian features predominate. And isn’t that curious? The Indians are illegally coming into the United States. Indians will always wander in the Americas and they should.

One lasting effect of illegal immigration, I believe, is that we will come to see America within the Americas. TheNew York Times in a feature story (August 4, 2006) describes the sense of dislocation many Americans in Southeastern states are feeling with the sudden appearance on the landscape of so many immigrants from Latin America. The black and white landscape of gothic memory is suddenly rendered unrecognizable. It may not look like what Faulkner described, but I bet it looks a lot more like what de Tocqueville saw. Brown illegal immigrants with Indian faces may usher the Georgian and the Virginian to a recognition that they now live within the New World—an illegal idea—and not in some distant colony of England.

There attaches to Mexico and to the Mexican in America a legend of illegality. Any American kid at the black-and-white cowboy movie understood why the bandit needed to get to the Mexican border. The outlaw would be free in Mexico, because Mexico is so thoroughly outside the law. In the updated (and eroticized) cowboy movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” Jack Twist takes his homosexual desire to Juarez, where Mexico consoles him in a dark alley.

For a long time, Mexican border towns have ministered to Americans who slipped over a line to relieve themselves of sanctions. Anything we wanted that was illegal on the American side of the line—liquor, gambling, abortion, divorce, whores—Mexico provided. Mexico was discrete; the American zipped up and returned to the daytime virtue of the United States.

For a long time, Americans have been similarly complicit in transactions for illegal labor. Americans were not as honorable as the Mexican madam, however. Every once in a while, an employer would call the cops on his own workers—just before payday. Or, having used Mexican labor for a generation, America would suddenly decide to go clean and deport vast numbers of Mexicans—many thousands in the Depression years—and then we found, with World War II, that we needed Mexico’s labor again.

A great deal has changed in America since the government-licensed “bracero program” of the ‘40s and ‘50s brought Mexicans to the United States for seasonal labor. By the 1960’s, immigration laws no longer discriminated in favor of Europeans. By the 1960s, entire Mexican families followed in the path of the father or the older brother.

The majority opinion in America is that Mexicans illegally in the United States should not be given citizenship. Mexicans broke the law, Americans say, playing the victim. As regards Mexican labor, America plays both victim and siren.

A mood of Protestant Reformation is sweeping the country. The fear of illegal immigrants along America’s southern border has increased proportionally as America’s support for the war in Iraq has waned. Americans feel a need to cleanse the country of illegality. September 11th makes that dream of cleansing urgent. We went to war in Iraq to play the actor in history rather than the victim. The wounded nation wanted a war movie with screeching skies and exploding earth and apocalyptic diction. But with the passage of years, after the daily news of car bombings, IED’s, the growing tally of war dead and maimed, and with images of hateful, ungrateful brown mobs protesting America’s presence in their cinderblock neighborhoods, Americans have grown skeptical of our ability to will a democracy onto a landscape we do not understand.

So we resort to our own desert. The anger we lately tapped to hunt the Arab terrorist, we now direct toward the migrant worker. The illegal immigrant becomes bin-Laden’s doppelganger. In order to turn our familiar use of the Mexican peasant into a fear of the Mexican peasant we have had to internationalize him. The migrant has illegally crossed an international border, we say.

In the end, this conflation of the cynical and the neurotic, this neurotic blurring of the peasant-worker with the terrorist could have the effect of creating exactly what America says it fears. If we are unable to distinguish the terrorist from the migrant worker, Americans will end up isolating illegal immigrants and their children from the mainstream, encouraging the adults to see themselves as mired in hopeless illegality, and their children to see themselves as off-spring of the undocumented, thus also criminal. And we will have Arabian Nights on a larger scale than those we witnessed last summer in Paris.

We do not acknowledge the trespasser as someone who is seeking to cross an economic border. America spends precious little of its affinity for biblical language and allusion on the plight of the illegal laborer. On Mexican hillsides, the beatitudes are as real and as plentiful as cardboard shanties. The Mexican peasant has the advantage, if you will allow me to call it that, of coming to America from a Catholic culture that honors suffering; that sees suffering as holy, and poverty as blessed, and therefore accords the poor a position (exactly opposite to the middle-class ethos of American Puritanism) over the middle class.

My own eyes tell me that Mexicans are not dishonored by their poverty, nor are they bent and unwilling to meet my glance. They show up for work early, and they stand outside the café on Fillmore Street as patient as cats in the dawn. Yesterday, I saw two young men, waiting in front of a renovated Victorian house, with their tools arranged in buckets. Their tools were hard-won and well-kept and ready. These were ready men.

Since America will not honor the poverty of the Mexican worker in theological terms, we should at least be clear that the Mexican is such a good worker because of the strength of the Mexican family. Mexicans work for each other; that is their reason for working.

On the other hand, I have heard Mexican astonishment at the kindness of strangers in America. The stranger gave me some money. The stranger gave me a ride in his truck. The stranger gave me some water. Whereas in Mexico, all such generosity takes place within the family, in America the generosity among strangers is often easier and more common than among relatives, and this amazes the Mexican.

America is a country where children are raised to leave home, and each generation is expected to seek its own way. The great pronoun of the United States is the Protestant pronoun—the “I”. America teaches its children independence and the bravery of the solitary path. The burden of life in America is loneliness. Not coincidentally, Mexican women, illegally in the United States, have been hired into the cold heart of America to sit with the young and the old.

The children of Mexican migrant workers, who are two or even three generations into this country, are faced with competing pronouns, and struggle to reconcile them. On the one hand, the Mexican American is expected to live within a family whose emotional architecture draws the child away from the window. On the other hand, America presents the child with an open door. As long as you understand this grammatical dilemma for the child struggling between the “we” and the “I”, any statistic you want—on Mexican American gangs, early marriage rates, suicide attempts, black-brown tensions, high school drop out rates, military heroism—becomes coherent.

I am a generation removed from the Mexican working class. My parents, who were legally here in the United States, were never called, within hearing of their children, a disgraceful burden to America; were never called an affront to their adopted country; were never called a drag on the morale on the United States of America.

I think no other children of poverty hear—on poisonous talk radio, even from the floor of the Congress—what the children of parents illegally in the United States are forced to hear. The contribution of illegal lives is never counted—never—as praise or admiration or courage or virtue of any kind. It is as though America, having benefited from illegal labor, pretends that the transaction was one of middle-class benevolence. Mexicans should be thankful for a month of cheerless eight-hour shifts, standing there waiting for the old lady to get off the commode. The odd thing is that they are thankful!

As I watched the proliferation of mass demonstrations across the country last spring, I noticed nuns and priests; lots of comic sombreros. I saw Mexican flags—a typical, humorous Mexican thing to do, to wrap yourself in the flag of Mexico, in order to insist on your desire to remain in the United States. I noticed families principally, parents and their children.

It was the first time I had seen the children of illegality demanding that the United States show respect for their parents. It was the first time I had seen illegal parents, standing fearlessly in public with their children. I tell you it was a momentous time in the history of the Americas. I hope you saw it.

Before replying to Richard Rodriquez’s excursus, let me reiterate proposals advanced in Mexifornia, a book published three years ago, and in a series of essays that followed.

The remedy for the present illegal immigration mess, for both immigrants and America the host, I think should focus on the three goals of reasonable numbers, legality, and assimilation.

Border enforcement, reliable identification cards, and employer sanctions can help to advance those aims. In contrast, a guest-worker program will only perpetuate the notion of a second-tier of residents, working for wages that most Americans would not—and yet deprived of the full civic rights enjoyed by their employers.

Such helotage would only breed understandable resentment among an underclass, “guest” or not, as well driving down wages in entry-level jobs sought by first-generation citizen workers (many of them Mexican-American).

The Bracero program is often evoked with nostalgia. But my early memories of it here in the San Joaquin Valley were of exploited workers, who did not always wish to go home after harvest, had some portion of their attached pay stolen by the Mexican government, and were contracted out as near chattel to the largest employers with the greatest political connections.

By the same token, deporting some 11 million Mexicans here illegally en masse makes little moral or practical sense. Some are aged and sick; many have lived productive lives that have enhanced the United States for decades, and could easily apply and receive citizenship without going back to Mexico.

A better approach then would be to return any illegal immigrants with criminal records and those who have only recently arrived, while offering a process of citizenship for many millions of the rest. And as part of a quid pro quo, in addition to closing an open border, we could systematically begin to eliminate bilingual documents, state interpreters, ethnic quotas in hiring, and linguistic separatism to encourage assimilation of naturalized Mexicans in the manner accorded to most other arrivals from southeast Asia, India, and Eastern Europe.

I now turn to Rodriquez’s stream of consciousness with a deep sense of regret, given both his earlier reasoned and often brave (or “notorious”) arguments against ethnic tribalism—and his present baffling obsession with skin color and yet more evidence of the astonishing decline of a once insightful writer. Here he has sadly advanced no real argument, but instead offers only a mélange of ethnic vignettes, and, for some reason, ad hominem attacks of the very sort he used to deplore.

First, I share Rodriquez’s worry that migrant workers are sometimes being demonized. But aside from necessary censure against bigots, it is all the more urgent to ensure that Mexican immigrants arrive in the United States legally, and in reasonable numbers that ensure that they can assimilate and find opportunities in education and employment as quickly as possible.

Yet we too often forget that much of the unfortunate animus toward illegal aliens is most often predicated on class considerations, more than race or religion. Americans of the lower middle classes of all races—who do not have nannies or gardeners, who rarely eat out or stay at a hotel, but who do compete for wages in construction and service industries with illegal aliens, and have their children in overcrowded inner-city or rural schools that are struggling with immigrants without English—are far more likely to demand reform than is our elite. The latter appreciates good cheap service while traveling and dining out, or industrious day-laborers for remodeling and landscaping—and, of course, has little worry about rival illegal-alien film producers, professors, writers, lawyers, or doctors undercutting their own salaries or unions.

Pace Rodriguez, we need not ask either a theologian or an economist about how much of Mexico we are willing to take in. We already have a good guess that one out of every ten Mexican citizens currently resides in the United States, most of them under illegal auspices.

This influx is largely due to the cynical policies of American business that wants robust Mexican youth to work cheaply at wages Americans apparently will not. When the worker’s vigor and health are exhausted, the employer expects to find a younger replacement from Mexico—with the added expectation that the government entitlement industry will provide for his former employee’s health and retirement needs.

Then there is the Mexican government that counts on $15 billion in remittances to prop up a near-failed state, without much care how minimum-wage workers abroad survive after sending so much of their wages home. Illegal immigration for Mexico is a safety valve that ensures dissidents migrate rather than agitate. And Mexico also nurses ethnic chauvinism and old grievances, delighted to discover that its expatriate community grows fonder of Mexico the longer and further it is free from it. Rodriquez thinks it is “curious” that “Indians” are coming north from Mexico. Perhaps, but instead of condemning the “cold heart” of America, he should ask why they apparently find “white” or “Anglo” culture more tolerant than the “Spanish” establishment of Mexico that is apparently relieved to see its own mestizos leave.

Yes, September 11 made Samuel Huntington a “prophet” because, unlike the determinist Francis Fukuyama, he warned that the end of the Cold War would not lead inevitably to a global acceptance of consumer capitalism, democracy, and the end of history, but, as in the case of radical Islam, that millions of reactionaries would reject modernity and globalization with a vengeance, sometimes violently so. Rodriquez should try to refute that thesis rather than cheaply lampoon its author.

Rodriquez also offers a laughable caricature of Huntington’s Who Are We? (I have no idea what his “brown” Charles River or “dialectical meetings” is supposed to mean). Huntington’s point was not to erase the toil and hard work of the variously mentioned aggrieved groups from our collective memory. Rather he argued that the assimilation that they—and most others from Europe as well—went through came mostly from a variant of Western culture derived in large part from Protestant England.

Again, as far as Rodriquez’s personal asides, I don’t know whether Samuel Huntington lives in a minaret in Cambridge; but I might hazard a guess that Rodriguez sees far more spires himself from the “restored Victorian” neighborhoods of San Francisco that are about as out of touch with the world of the illegal alien as is Harvard Yard—despite his own use of the throat-clearing “as a Mexican-American” twice in the same paragraph.

Rodriguez also offers the same cartoon of my own work, and he gives that game away with the buzz nouns and meaningless adjectives so often tossed about by the race industry— “white,” “nativist,” “peasants,” etc. He thinks I am “ungenerous’ in being angry when a “kid” damages my property. But most of the illegal alien “kids” that I have seen over the last twenty years are those that I taught and tutored classics to at Cal State Fresno. In fact, I have had not one “kid,” but five adult aliens ram their vehicles into our vineyards and orchards, all fleeing the scene, but leaving behind only their unregistered and uninsured wrecked cars that have done over $50,000 in aggregate damage.

Is it “ungenerous” to worry about having been broadsided by an uninsured and illegal driver who tried to run from the scene of a serious accident, or having our home broken into twice while the five of us were asleep and awoke to intruders? Given the sheer numbers of illegal aliens, the predominance of single, young men in that cohort, and the laxity of the host that both wants and doesn’t want the newcomers, I am surprised crime, vandalism, and neglect of the law are not more prevalent.

Nor is there any need for more lectures from the Bay Area about Steinbeck’s “Okies.” My wife’s family migrated from Oklahoma, as did most of the so-called whites who still live nearby in southwestern Fresno County. That the literary Rodriquez draws on the Grapes of Wrath, and sees only melodrama rather than tragedy, is once again indicative of his lack of any recent first-hand familiarity with either illegal immigrants or “Okies.” And the clash of cultures that arose from the great Dust Bowl migration from the American Southwest was not just a matter of prejudice against the poor and unwashed—although it was surely that. Many of Steinbeck’s romantic Joads also brought with them from the South its racial hostility and fundamentalism that were bound to collide with a very different preexisting multiethnic, half-century-old culture of the Central Valley. I’ll leave it to Rodriquez to ponder whether the Methodists or Lutherans of a Visalia or Kingsburg were any more intolerant that the Holy Rollers of the new Pentecostal congregations of Tulare and Bakersfield that appeared in the 1930s.

More importantly, throughout this essay we suffer through more silly stereotypes that remain just that despite the rhetorical flourishes: Mexicans are “sweet” and love their families, charming in their “lard” and “beer.” Americans are hypocrites, but “nice.” Gringo is an OK word—if voiced by a “Mexican-American.”

Somehow a rant on Iraq makes its way into this blur, with its “screeching skies” and “exploding earth” and “the illegal immigrant becomes bin-Laden’s doppelganger”—whatever that means. Somewhere in all this mess, I think Rodriguez is trying to laugh at “nice” Americans who for some reason have this absolutely odd notion that more stealthy terrorists might try to cross an unguarded 1,500 mile border to trump the mass murder of September 11. Next thing he will snicker at the equally silly recent concerns over packing shampoo in our carry-on luggage at airports.

At this point the only thing missing was the tired La Raza mythologizing about “Gringos” who “stole” Mexican land—and, then, of course it too appeared, sort of at least. But if it is to be a question of theft rather than tragedy, Mexico took the American Southwest from Spain, who lifted it from Indians, and so on back to Neanderthal times—as is the way with most of the history of our aggressive species.

Yet what is odd, from a military and historical view, about the Mexican War and its aftermath, is not that conquering armies the world over regrettably annex land, but that after invading and occupying central Mexico, the United States wanted little of it, acquired only a small sparsely populated part of its northern territory, tried to legalize the transaction, and then had a fierce national debate over the morality of it all. If he wishes to return to the 19th century, Rodriquez could do better by exploring its ironic legacy: recent polls of Mexicans revealed two contradictory sentiments: most expressed a desire to leave and emigrate to the United States, but a near majority also thought that our Southwest does—and should—belong to Mexico. An Orwellian corollary then follows: should El Norte return to Mexico, then many Mexicans would not wish to escape to El Norte?

Catholicism and the notion of suffering, together with asides about Protestantism and Puritanism, permeate Rodriguez’s essay. Left unsaid is that the absence of family planning in a postagrarian age—more so even than questions of income parity—ensures that many immigrant families, arriving with 3-8 children, will never in the first generation achieve a parity of livelihood with American households who rarely have more than three offspring.

While the Catholic Church is critical of government efforts to curtail the number of illegal aliens, it is silent about its own role in this nexus between poverty, “suffering,” and large families. Only six out of ten second-generation Mexican Americans on average graduate from high school in four years; and less than ten percent have a BA degree—the legacy not of racism or America’s “cold heart,” but of millions arriving from Mexico without English, education, and legality.

I don’t believe much of what Rodriquez has written here, and suspect he really doesn’t either—except in one instance: his own revealing admission about the spring demonstrations that “It was the first time I had seen illegal parents, standing fearlessly in public with their children.”

Had Richard Rodriquez left the world of Fillmore Street cafés more often to visit a baseball game in Orange Cove, the emergency room in Selma, or the public park in Parlier, he could have witnessed just such “fearlessness”—which for 30 years has pretty much been about the norm around here.

Richard Rodriguez is an essayist in the humanist tradition and thus comments on the cultural meaning of Mexican immigration and the symbolic importance of Mexicans in American society. As a student of culture myself, I concur with his emphasis on cultural meanings and symbols in the current debate. Indeed, as I pointed out in a recent article, “the Mexico-U.S. border is much more than a boundary between two nations. Over the years it has become a symbolic stage upon which the nation’s insecurities and fears, hopes and dreams, are projected for public consumption” and that as a result, “American border policy has less to do with the underlying realities of Mexican immigration than with the nation’s view of itself and its place in the world.” (Chronicle of Higher Education Review, June 30, B11).

Despite my appreciation for the cultural ramifications of Mexican immigration, I am a social scientist and ultimately believe that accurate understanding needs to be grounded in empirical reality. In 25 years of research on a variety of public policy issues, I have never seen so much misinformation as in the debate on Mexican immigration during 2006. Thanks to the media and political entrepreneurs, Mexican immigrants are routinely portrayed as a tidal wave of human beings fleeing an impoverished, disorganized nation who are desperate to settle in the United States, where they will overwhelm our culture, displace our language, mooch our social services, and undermine our national security.

This profile, however, bears no discernible relationship to the reality that I know as a social scientist. Since 1982 I have co-directed a large data-gathering effort known as the Mexican Migration Project. My collaborators and I have conducted representative surveys in communities all over Mexico and the United States, and over the years, we have surveyed 20,000 households and 120,000 individuals to gather detailed information from U.S. migrants about their experiences crossing the border, living in the United States, and returning to Mexico. My understanding of Mexican immigration rests on these data, and if anyone thinks I’ve got it all wrong, they are free to download the data, analyze it, and see for themselves.

Mexican immigration is not a tidal wave. The rate of undocumented migration has not increased in over two decades. Neither is Mexico a demographic time bomb; its fertility rate is only slightly above replacement. Although a variety of trans-border population movements have increased, this is to be expected in a North American economy that is increasingly integrated under the terms of a mutually-ratified trade agreement. Undocumented migration stems from the unwillingness of the United States to include labor within the broader framework governing trade and investment. Rates of migration between Mexico and the United States are entirely normal for two countries so closely integrated economically.

Mexico is not impoverished or disorganized. It is a dynamic, one trillion dollar economy and, along with Canada, our largest trading partner. Its per capita income is $10,000, which puts it at the upper tier of middle income countries, not far behind Russia’s per capita income of $11,000. Compared with Russia, however, Mexico has a much better developed infrastructure of highways, ports, railroads, telecommunications, and social services that give it a poverty rate of 18% rather than 40%, as well as a male life expectancy of 73 years rather than 61 years (U.S. figures are 12% and 75 years, respectively). Unlike Russia, moreover, Mexico is a functioning democracy with open and competitive elections, a separation of powers, and a well-defined party system.

In keeping with these realities, Mexicans are not desperate to settle north of the border. Most migrants are not fleeing poverty so much as seeking social mobility. They typically have a job and income in Mexico and are seeking to finance some economic goal at home—acquiring a home, purchasing land, capitalizing a business, investing in education, smoothing consumption. Left to themselves, the vast majority of migrants will return once they have met their economic goals. From 1965 to 1985, 85% of undocumented entries from Mexico were offset by departures and the net increase in the undocumented population was small. The build-up of enforcement resources at the border has not decreased the entry of migrants so much as discouraged their return home. Since the late 1980s the rate of undocumented out-migration has been halved. Undocumented population growth in the United States stems not from rising in-migration, but from falling out-migration.

To Americans who fear cultural displacement, I say look at what’s happening south of the border. Cultural influences travel in both directions and in an integrated economy they are inevitable. Given the global hegemony of the United States, however, the cultural effects are asymmetric. We influence Mexican culture and society far more than they affect U.S. culture and society. Within Mexico, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Toys ‘R Us, and 7-11 are increasingly displacing Mexican outlets. Even Taco Bell is making inroads, and American cultural traditions such as Halloween and Santa Claus now compete with Mexican celebrations such as Day of the Dead and Three Kings Day.

Linguistically, English-speakers certainly have nothing to fear. English is increasingly spoken in Mexico and is viewed as essential for social and economic advancement. Even the smallest towns and cities in Mexico have bustling English language academies, and English has become a core part of the Spanish spoken by most Mexicans. Within the United States, in contrast, few Anglo-Americans speak Spanish and although it may be widely spoken among new immigrants, there is a rapid shift to English over time. Few of children of immigrants use Spanish rather than English and virtually none of their grandchildren can speak it at all.

Mexican immigrants do not migrate to take advantage of U.S. social services. Their service usage rates are well below those of other immigrant groups and have fallen sharply since the mid-1990s. Undocumented migrants, in particular, are more likely to pay taxes than to use public services, and even those they do use—mainly education and medical care—are consumed at rates well below what one would expect given their socioeconomic characteristics. The problem of paying for services to immigrants is serious, but one that is easily solved through federal transfers. Whereas tax revenues accrue disproportionately to the federal government, the costs of immigration are borne locally.

Mexico is not a threat to U.S. national security. It is an ally and friendly trading nation that annually spends less than 0.8% of GDP on its military. There are a million U.S. citizens living in Mexico and ten million Mexicans living in the United States, all of whom have multiple ties of kinship, friendship, and commerce that cross the border. Tourism is extensive and large shares of citizens in both countries have spent time on the other side of the border. Mexico has no resident Islamic community, no known terrorist cells, and has never been a launching pad for terrorist attacks on the United States. Those attributes describe our neighbor to the north, not our neighbor to the south.

The demagogic portrayal of Mexico as a threat to American culture, society, and security has not solved the problems associated with Mexico-U.S. migration; it has only made them worse. Rather than seeking to build a wall between our two countries, we should adopt the stance taken by the European Union when it integrated poor neighbors such as Spain and Portugal in the 1980s and Poland and Hungary today. Rather than seeking to block flows of people that naturally follow from trade and investment within a common market, we should work to make sure these movements occur under circumstances that are beneficial to all concerned, promoting growth in Mexico, minimizing costs to the United States, and protecting the rights of immigrant and native workers.

I agree with Richard Rodriguez that economists have no special expertise in answering many of the most important questions raised by Mexican immigration. Indeed, economic arguments are often adopted by advocates on either side of the debate as a socially acceptable way of advancing positions that really have more to do with thorny issues of culture, race, and religion. Nonetheless, because it’s what I know something about, I’m going to focus on the issue of economic assimilation. Furthermore, I’m going to take a longer-term perspective by looking past the immigrant generation to instead consider the U.S.-born descendants of Mexican immigrants.

As a self-styled “nation of immigrants,” the United States takes great pride in its historical success as a “melting pot” able to absorb and unify people coming from diverse lands and cultures. At the same time, however, pride in our immigrant heritage always seems tempered by the nagging fear that the most recent arrivals are somehow different, that the latest wave of foreigners won’t integrate into the mainstream of American society. Certainly, this fear was voiced when Italians and other relatively unskilled immigrants arrived in large numbers at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. Time has assuaged this particular fear. In terms of outcomes such as educational attainment, occupation, and earnings, the sizable differences by national origin that initially persisted among earlier European immigrants have largely disappeared among the modern-day descendants of these immigrants

Are Mexicans following the same intergenerational trajectory as European immigrants? Many doubt it, and they can point to several factors that might slow the pace of assimilation by Mexicans today as compared to Europeans in the past. For example, consider the vast scale of current immigration flows from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, the substantial (though lessening) geographic concentration of these flows within the United States, and the fact that such flows have remained sizable over a much longer period of time than did the influx from any particular European country. These features of Mexican immigration foster the growth of ethnic enclaves in the United States where Mexicans and their descendants could, if they so choose, live and work without being forced to learn English or to Americanize in other important ways.

In addition, today’s economy provides fewer opportunities for unskilled workers to advance than did the economy that greeted earlier European immigrants. Around 1900, high school completion was uncommon for native-born Americans, so while many European immigrants arrived with relatively meager educations, their skill disadvantage was smaller than that faced today by Mexican immigrants who almost always lack the additional years of high school and college that have become the norm for U.S. natives. Moreover, recent decades have witnessed a large rise in earnings inequality among American workers, driven by substantial increases in the labor market payoffs to education and other indicators of skill. As a result, the skill deficit of Mexican immigrants has become even more of a liability in our modern economy that places a higher premium on knowledge and cognitive ability.

What do we know about the socioeconomic achievement of the children, grandchildren, and more distant descendants of Mexican immigrants? In light of the reasons for pessimism listed above, U.S.-born Mexican Americans have done surprisingly well, though certainly areas of serious concern remain. Like Europeans in the past, Mexicans enjoy ample intergenerational progress between first-generation immigrants and their second-generation children. Relative to their parents, the U.S.-born second generation experiences dramatic increases in English proficiency, educational attainment, and earnings. From this generational perspective, the lightning-rod issue of language—in terms of both English acquisition and Spanish preservation—loses all its spark. By the time they are teens, second-generation Mexican Americans overwhelming prefer to speak English rather than Spanish, and by the third generation most Mexican Americans no longer speak Spanish at all.

In general, the labor market opportunities available to U.S.-born Mexican Americans are similar to those afforded non-Hispanic whites with identical skills. On average, the employment and earnings of Mexican Americans are close to the outcomes of Anglos who are the same age and have the same schooling. In contrast, the situation for African-American men is very different, with large and persistent black-white gaps in employment rates and earnings even after accounting for education and other measurable skill characteristics. Consequently, the potential role of other factors—such as discrimination, family background, or neighborhood—in explaining economic disadvantage is smaller for Mexican Americans than for African Americans. Even outside of the labor market context, Mexicans seem to be faring better than blacks. On two important indicators of socially risky behavior, male incarceration and unwed motherhood, the rates for U.S.-born Mexican Americans exceed those of Anglos but do not approach the very high rates of African Americans.

There is one crucial area, however, where Mexican Americans lag behind both whites and blacks: education. This problem is well-known, although popular accounts often greatly exaggerate its magnitude by not distinguishing Mexican immigrants from U.S.-born Mexican Americans. Nonetheless, high school dropout is disturbingly prevalent for U.S.-born Mexicans, even for those in the third generation and beyond (i.e., for the U.S.-born grandchildren and later descendants of Mexican immigrants). Inevitably, college attendance and completion rates are also much lower for Mexican Americans. Because the educational disadvantage of this group largely explains their below-average earnings, finding a way to eliminate the schooling gap would go a long way toward bridging the economic divide that remains between Mexican Americans and the Anglo majority. As Rodriguez notes, the limited educational success of U.S.-born Mexicans may reflect cultural pressures to subordinate personal achievement for the sake of family unity, a social dynamic that Rodriguez aptly describes as the struggle between competing pronouns “I” and “we”. Surely, however, some other immigrant groups (e.g., Italians) faced a similar dynamic and still were able to integrate fully into American society, so perhaps we can expect that ultimately the same thing will occur for Mexicans.

Frequent intermarriage is one of the strongest signals of social assimilation by an ethnic group. After a few generations in the United States, so much intermarriage had taken place among the descendants of earlier European immigrants that most white Americans could choose among multiple ancestries or ethnic identities. For such individuals, ethnicity has become subjective, situational, and largely symbolic, and the social boundaries between these ethnic groups have been almost completely erased.

In this context, it is encouraging to note that intermarriage is widespread among Mexican Americans. More than a third of married, U.S.-born Mexicans have non-Mexican spouses, with the overwhelming majority of these non-Mexican spouses being U.S.-born, non-Hispanic whites. Because it takes two Mexican-origin spouses to create an endogamous Mexican marriage, whereas a Mexican intermarriage requires only one Mexican-origin spouse, the observed rate of intermarriage implies that almost half of Mexican-American marriages involve a non-Mexican spouse.

Co-author Brian Duncan and I have begun to study how Mexican intermarriage influences the ethnic identification of the children produced by these marriages. Not surprisingly, virtually all children with two Mexican-origin parents are identified as Mexican in Census data, but about 30 percent of the children of intermarried Mexican Americans are not identified as Mexican. As this dynamic plays out across generations, it is likely that an increasingly small fraction of the descendants of Mexican immigrants continue to identify themselves as Mexican. Moreover, this process of ethnic leakage is highly selective, because Mexican Americans who intermarry tend to have much higher education and earnings than Mexican Americans who do not intermarry. Consequently, available data for third- and higher-generation Mexicans, who usually can only be identified by their subjective responses to questions about Hispanic ethnicity, probably understate the socioeconomic attainment of this population. In effect, through the selective nature of intermarriage and ethnic identification, some of the most successful descendants of Mexican immigrants assimilate to such an extent that they fade from empirical observation. Unfortunately, although the direction of this measurement bias seems clear, we don’t yet have a good idea of its magnitude.

Overall, my reading of the evidence is that Mexican Americans are not too far off the path of intergenerational assimilation traveled by previous waves of European immigrants. During their first few generations in the United States, Mexican-American families experience substantial economic and social mobility, and their actual progress is probably even greater than what we see in available data. The relatively slow rate of educational improvement is a critical problem, however, especially because the schooling deficit of Mexican Americans is the major obstacle to their economic integration. Another potential concern is that many Mexicans enter the United States as illegal immigrants. Rodriguez makes the compelling point that growing up in an undocumented household could have profound effects on the children of Mexican immigrants, but unfortunately I’m not aware of any research on the intergenerational impact of illegal immigration. Despite these concerns, I agree with the broad conclusion reached by historian Joel Perlmann, whose recent book Italians Then, Mexicans Now carefully compares the intergenerational mobility experienced by low-skill European immigrants arriving in the United States around 1900 with that experienced by modern-day Mexicans. Perlmann suggests that “Mexican economic assimilation may take more time—four or five generations rather than three or four.” If Perlmann is right, then the long-term integration of Mexican Americans may not turn out all that differently from the success stories often recounted for previous waves of U.S. immigration.

The thing that stands out in the debate on Mexican immigration is its emotional content, and the exchange on Cato Unbound is no exception. A lot of people are very upset about the issue—angry, fearful, resentful, suspicious, and often vindictive. The raw emotion on display has less to do with the management of labor flows between two friendly trading nations than with Americans’ own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. And truth be told, Americans have a lot to worry about.

Feelings of economic insecurity are to be expected in a country where inequalities of income and wealth are at unprecedented levels, public services are steadily eroding, infrastructure is deteriorating, both consumers and the federal government have accumulated record debt, and there is not much of a safety net to catch you if you fall. Feelings of physical insecurity are likewise natural in an age of rising terrorism, religious extremism, and economic polarization between nations, and when mother nature herself seems bent on exacting revenge for the build-up of CO2 and other pollutants in the atmosphere.

These problems are very real and very big, and our leaders in government have done very little to address them. The War in Iraq to date has simply bred more terror and hatred, federal spending continues to spiral out of control, the dollar is weakening globally, inequality proceeds upward, global temperatures shift steadily upward, and ideologies—religious, political, and cultural—continue to polarize society domestically and internationally. Government seems paralyzed and unable to confront daunting issues such as globalization, fundamentalism, fossil fuel depletion, and terrorism. Likewise, individual Americans have a hard time wrapping their heads around such monumental issues.

In this context, the Mexico-U.S. border assumes importance as a symbol of America’s loss of control and vulnerability, and Mexican immigration becomes an issue in which people pour out their anguish over the precarious state of the nation and their control over their lives within it. Mexicans, of course, are not responsible for America’s rising inequality and soaring debt, and they have little to with fundamentalism, terrorism, global warming, or fossil fuel depletion.

But that is beside the point. Symbolically, the border and the human traffic across it has acquired great symbolic value, and feckless politicians unable to face the real problems in the world have a self-interest in fanning the perception of Mexico and Mexicans as threatening aliens and dangerous invaders bent on destroying our culture, language, and way of life, and the average citizen finds it much easier to focus on an enemy with a face (and a brown one at that) rather than amorphous problems such as debt, inequality, terror, ideology, and extremism. Mexican immigration has become the lightening rod and Mexican immigrants the scapegoat for all that is fearful and threatening in the world today.

Emotional displacement, ethnic scare-mongering, and the scapegoating of immigrants are nothing new in American history. But they don’t solve our problems, and in the case of Mexican immigration they make them worse. Our immigration and border policies with respect to Mexico may have served the political purpose of diverting attention away from other pressing issues and giving citizens a concrete focus for their fears and insecurities, but they have completely backfired in their efforts to reduce migration to the United States. In my research I have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the militarization of the border did not lower the rate of in-migration so much as reduce the rate of return migration, and that it is the growing imbalance between rates of in- and out-migration that is causing the unprecedented growth of the Mexican population within the United States and costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

If there is one thing we have learned from cognitive neuroscience in the past few years it is that the brain has two components—one emotional and one rational—with the emotional brain generally having the upper hand in cognition. In fact, it proves to be fairly easy to mobilize the emotional centers of the brain so as to overwhelm its rational faculties, and this is what has happened in the debate on immigration. Many people see me as an apologist for an alien invasion, but if they would just put aside their emotions for a minute, look at my research, and listen to what I have to say, they will discover that what I am really proposing are policies that will reduce the number of Mexicans settling in the United States, limit long-term growth of the undocumented population, lower costs to U.S. taxpayers, improve wages and working conditions for American workers, and promote more rapid economic growth and development one of our two closest neighbors and trading partners.

I don’t find those who worry about illegal immigration necessarily rawly emotional, much less volatile, racist, nativist, or all the other slights thrown their way from abstract thinkers. After all, there are some 11 million people here illegally, largely from Mexico and/or Latin America. Aside from the social, economic, and ethical issues, there is the unspoken notion of the violation of the law. No humane or civilized society can exist long when the laws—and there are no statutes more fundamental than those governing citizenship and entry into a nation—are systematically flouted by employer, government itself, and immigrants alike. If one talks to Korean, Punjabi, or Southeast Asian immigrants who came here legally, and who try to have relatives do the same, there is a great deal of resentment that the law is not being applied equitably, and has lost both its legal and moral force.

Again, I do not see the need to conceptualize illegal immigration in terms of the Iraqi war, or the purported unfairness of the American system—not so apparent to much of the world, since the United States accepts more legal immigrants than almost all other nations combined. Most students of the issue accept that the present non-system must change. Compromise is possible that envisions a sort of earned citizenship for most of those here illegally, who should not be deported en masse, with the understanding that the border will close to those who in the future attempt to cross illegally.

Questions such as methods of assimilation and guest workers can be adjudicated once the most pressing problem—what to do with those here and how to restore legality to the crossing of the border—are dealt with. I think anyone who has grown up in largely Mexican communities composed of illegal aliens realizes that when immigrants are assimilated, not found in non-integrated enclaves, and living alongside other Americans of differing races, religions, and ethic backgrounds, their eventual pattern of Americanization in fact does resemble those of 19th-century Italians. However, when we witness de facto apartheid communities of largely Spanish-speaking, poorly educated immigrants who are without legality, then their record of success, and their childrens’, is a very different matter altogether. We are seeing both patterns of success and failure, but when the pool of 11 million is so large, we can be 70% successful and still have considerable problems with millions of illegal aliens.

That the worry over illegal immigration resonates broadly with Democrats and Republicans of the Southwest, both supporters and opponents of Mr. Bush, black, white, and Mexican-American, of all religions, should suggest that it cannot be simply written off to some emotional or unhinged cadre of Americans. In short, nothing I have read in the Cato Unbound essays and exchanges has dissuaded me that one’s position is often predicated along class lines, with elites— who are not in competition for employment with illegal aliens, whose children are not in affected schools, whose homes and property are not near influxes of illegal aliens, and who find that illegal labor is essential in many of the services they draw upon—not merely unconcerned with the severity of the issue but, in condescending fashion, deprecating those who are.

Doug Massey is right. The debate about Mexican immigration easily turns emotional, and it often aggravates Americans’ feelings of insecurity that are not directly related to immigration. September 11 and subsequent events have intensified these emotions, but sizeable immigration flows to the United States have always provoked similar responses, both in modern times with respect to Mexican immigration (e.g., the debate leading up to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, or California’s Proposition 183), and throughout our history with respect to previous immigration waves.

Nonetheless, I agree with Victor Davis Hanson that the illegal nature of most Mexican immigration is a big problem, even for those who believe that on the whole the United States benefits from such immigration. In addition to the issues that Hanson raises, there is the fundamental point that before we can hope to reform U.S. immigration policy, we must first gain better control over who enters the country. As amply demonstrated by the research of Massey and others, Mexicans still seem to find it relatively easy to enter the United States outside of our official admissions system. Until that changes, discussions about the best U.S. policy toward Mexican immigration remain largely academic.

Therefore, to my mind, the critical question is: how do we begin to control illegal immigration from Mexico? I don’t know the answer. I have no particular expertise on this topic, so I’m hoping for guidance from those of you with more knowledge about the issue. But let me indulge in a few observations.

Border enforcement cannot be the primary answer. In recent years, we have dramatically increased expenditures on manpower and technology aimed at stopping illegal border crossing, with minimal results (and, as Massey points out, often counterproductive ones). If we continue trying to control illegal immigration in this fashion, we will spend huge sums of money to little effect.

Given that most illegal immigrants come to the United States to work, why don’t we get serious about workplace enforcement? Retail stores are able to verify in a matter of seconds consumer credit cards used to make purchases. Why couldn’t a similar system be put in place to verify the Social Security numbers of employees before they are hired? Many European countries have systems like this in place. Why don’t we try out something like that? Are Americans really that opposed to national identification cards? I realize that, in many ways, the immigration situation in Europe is different from that in the United States. I also realize that an electronic verification system would miss immigrants employed in the underground economy. But I suspect that we could do much more to control illegal immigration by directing technology and other enforcement resources toward the workplace rather than toward our porous southern border.

So the debate is not emotional? See how quickly it degenerates into ad hominem attacks. The facts, however, are these:

The United States has received significant Mexican immigration since 1907, when U.S. employers began recruitment in Mexico following the termination of labor migration from Japan.

The U.S. government sponsored its own labor recruitment programs in 1917-1918 and 1942-1964.

Undocumented migration rose only as legal avenues to U.S. entry were progressively closed off: by ending the Bracero Program (1965), capping immigration from the Western Hemisphere (1968), placing Mexico under the country quota (1976), and limiting family immigration (1996).

Despite all the talk of floods and invasions, the level of undocumented in-migration to the U.S. has not increased in several decades. If anything, it has declined. What has changed is the rate of out-migration, and this has occurred because of our militarization of the border. Rather than circulating back and forth, migrants avoid the gauntlet we have erected at the border by hunkering down and staying longer in the U.S.

The net effect of our harsh border policy has been to increase the rate of undocumented population growth in the U.S. By lowering the rate of return migration to Mexico while leaving the rate of in-migration largely unaffected, it has increased net migration from around 180,000 persons per year in the late 1970s and early 1980s to around 368,000 per year over the past decade.

The increase in border enforcement has actually reduced the probability of apprehending undocumented border crossers to a 40-year low by pushing the flows into remote territory where fewer officers are stationed. But it has also tripled the death rate.

It is logically contradictory, and impossible in practical terms, to create a single North American economy that integrates markets for goods, capital, raw materials, services, and information but somehow keeps labor markets separate.

Since NAFTA took effect, total trade with Mexico has tripled, the entry of intra-company transfers from Mexico has increased by a factor of six, Mexican tourism has increased nearly threefold, the number of business and exchange visitors has nearly doubled, and the entry of Mexican investors has grown 30 times.

Around one million U.S. citizens presently live in Mexico and around 11 million Mexicans live in the US.

Our efforts to maintain the fiction that we can integrate economically while maintaining separate labor markets through an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement have not only failed; they have backfired by accelerating the rate of undocumented population growth and lowering the probability of apprehension.

It is clear to me that repressive immigration policies toward Mexico have failed at great cost to taxpayers and that a different approach is called for. I believe that the United States should treat Mexico in much the same way that Western Europe treated Spain and Portugal when they were brought into the European Union, and the way that Western Europe is now treating Poland and other nations in Eastern Europe. If we worked with Mexico to improve its markets for capital, credit, and insurance and raise the level of its infrastructure, we would eliminate the economic incentives that now drive migration within the decade. And in the short term, if we were to offer temporary worker visas to Mexicans, many of those now in the country would ultimately return home. For those who are too deeply enmeshed in the United States to return at this point, a legalization program is the only humane alternative. People who entered the country as minors should be given blanket amnesty as long as they have no criminal record, for they are guilty of nothing more than obeying their parents. For the remainder, they should be given provisional legalization, and a path to legal permanent residence should be established to allow them to adjust status through the accumulation of credits for paying taxes, learning English, staying employed, having US-born children, and generally staying out of trouble.

If we did these things, I believe everyone would be better off—Mexicans in Mexico, Americans here, and the migrants themselves. If we bring migrants above ground, charge fees for temporary labor visas, and collect taxes from all migrants, it would be possible to create a pool of money to offset the very real costs of immigration to state and local governments, mainly for heath care and education. American workers would also benefit by competing against workers with full labor rights rather than comepeting against an exploitable underground pool, especially if the measures I propose were to be accompanied by a simple employment verification program required of all employers to confirm the right to work.

The system we have now is a dismal failure, and going further down the road of repressive border enforcement will only continue past trends: lowering the rate of return to Mexico, raising the rate of undocumented population growth in this country, squandering taxpayers’ money, and needlessly causing the deaths of hundreds of people.

I am afraid much of the debate will appear counterintuitive, if not Orwellian, to most Americans of the Southwest: Mexico is not in all that bad shape (forget the near insurrection in Oaxaca, or the drug badlands along the border; or that one in ten Mexicans have abandoned their country); border enforcement leads to more, not less, illegal immigration; those who are worried that illegal immigration flaunts the law and is creating apartheid communities of those without education, legality, or English are largely deluded or driven by less than reputable motives; having verifiable IDs pose as many problems as having fraudulent ones.

I’m afraid much of the debate will be counterintuitive, if not Orwellian, to most Mexicans. The U.S. is not in that bad shape (forget the disaster in New Orleans, the tainted elections in Florida and Ohio, the record deficit, skyrocketing inequality, and the record number of Americans in poverty); that a militarized border is somehow normal between two friendly trading nations; that the highest incarceration rate in the world and a growing gulag of torture centers indicates America’s respect for law and order; that Americans only invade other countries with the best of motives; or that rounding up Mexicans is more useful for the war on terror than a verifiable national ID card.

Given how hard it seems to forge a political consensus over what to do about Mexican immigration, I find some comfort in the indications that immigration flows from Mexico to the United States could decrease substantially in the not too distant future. Over the past half century, fertility rates in Mexico have declined sharply to less than a third of their initial levels, and these rates are expected to continue to fall until they reach replacement levels or below. At the same time, the rapid rise of average educational attainment and women’s labor force participation in Mexico suggest that the country is poised to make extensive economic and social advances. As the Mexican population becomes older and richer, the pressure for immigration to the United States will diminish, and the best available projections have immigration flows from Mexico starting to decline in the very near future. In this sense, the “problem” of Mexican immigration may ease on its own. Of course, even if this happens, there remains the important issue of how to facilitate integration for the millions of legal and illegal Mexican immigrants already in the United States, but reduced inflows of new immigrants would certainly help this process along.