Leadership (Abuja)
Atang Izang
28 April 2008
interview
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall courses in military history and classical culture. He was a full-time farmer before joining CSU Fresno, in 1984 to initiate a classics programme. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin. Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991-92), a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism (2002), and an Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001) and was named alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2002).
He was also the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002-3). He received the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lectureship in 2004 and the 2006 Nimitz Lectureship in Military History at UC Berkeley in 2006. Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly papers, and newspaper editorials on matters ranging from Greek, agrarian and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture. He has written or edited 16 books, including Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983; paperback ed. University of California Press, 1998); The Western Way of War (Alfred Knopf, 1989; 2d paperback ed. University of California Press, 2000); Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience (Routledge, 1991; paperback., 1992); The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (Free Press, 1995; He serves on the editorial board of Arion, the Military History Quarterly, and City Journal. Since 2001, has written a weekly column for National Review Online, and in 2004, began his syndicated column for Tribune Media Services. In 2006, he began writing a blog for Pajamas Media, Works and Days. Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, Classics, 1975), the American School of Classical Studies (1978-79) and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1980. He lives and works with his family on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953. (2006). Victor Davis Hanson speaking to students at UC Santa Barbara in May 2004. Excerpts:
Professor Hanson, you criticise U.S. immigration policy in your recent book Mexifornia. What is it that bothers you about the development at the Southern border?
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.
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?
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. legitimised 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.'
How would you phrase the main thesis of your book?
Promotion of traditional assimilation, integration, and intermarriage of legal immigrants who come lawfully, in measured numbers, and are willing to accept the language, protocols, and culture of their newly adopted country.
What does the emergence of Mexifornia mean for the U.S.? What consequences are likely to arise from it?
If illegal immigration continues and we reach 30-40 million illegal residents from south of the border, who don't fully assimilate in rapid fashion, then look at the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, and elsewhere for the sorts of factionalism and sectarianism we will soon experience. We are already beginning to see towns and communities in the American Southwest resort to apartheid status, where English is not spoken and Mexican nationals here illegally comprise the vast majority of the resident population.
Why is the U.S. allowing this to happen?
The libertarian/corporate Right likes cheap, exploitable labor, while the identity-politics on the Left wants more constituents. And the majority in between was asleep at the wheel for thirty years, afraid to speak out lest they be called "protectionists" and "nativists" by elites who read the Wall Street Journal and "racists" by the academic and political left.
Which measures do you think the Federal Government needs to take in response?
Fence the points of easiest transit; beef up security; provide a fool-proof ID; fine employers who hire illegals; do not provide public services in multiple languages; insist that newcomers are legal, and accept our language and protocols. Close the border and fine employers, and then the influx will stop - and the existing cohort of illegals will insidiously begin to assimilate and disappear as a distinct bloc.
President Bush is perceived as a conservative and patriotic leader. Would you consider this a fair appreciation of his attempts to deal with the "Mexifornia" issue? Why hasn't he been able to solve this problem? And if he can't solve it, will any future president be able to?
The Left agrees with him, but nevertheless wants to see him fail for political purposes in the post-Iraq climate; the Right thinks he is a megaphone for Wall Street and privileges the employers' concerns over the middle class's anxieties. So his policies are orphaned and the debate has moved so far to the right that his moderate suggestions seem radically liberal in this new political landscape.
Do you think the "Mexifornia" issue is a reflection of the mental state of the union, or does this sound too far-fetched to you?
The term I borrowed, "Mexifornia," from the radical left-wing Chicano movement suggests an alternate future of chaos, but one that we still have it in our power to avoid.
How did readers and critics respond to your book? Did you get a lot of negative reactions?
In 2003 the Left thought the book was illiberal and slandered it; now the Right finds that it is too tepid and assimilationist. So the debate in five years has swung hard-right to an astonishing degree.
Like the U.S., Europe is currently subject to a strong immigration wave - although not Hispanic but Muslim in origin. Based on your research into what has been happening in the U.S., do you have any advice to offer to Europeans?
Curb the numbers. Jettison multicultural mish-mash, and instead insist on assimilation and integration. Show pride in your culture that newcomers, after all, have voted by their very presence to accept. Distinguish legal from illegal immigration and don't let tribalists and illiberals masquerade as progressives as they demonize the very sanctuary they flee to. Most immigrants who are unhappy and bite the hand that feeds them learn their venom from disaffected Western elites.
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