How illegal immigration has affected life in central California

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

In an age of 500 sanctuary city and county jurisdictions, few illegal aliens believe they will ever be deported permanently, even if they have been apprehended committing serious crimes. There is also a general perception among would-be illegal entrants that prominent Democrats and progressives welcome their massive influxes as useful and will do their best to ensure illegal immigration continues unabated.

...How Illegal Immigration Changes Us
Illegal immigration and its effects on a community are incremental but steady. This past week, two miles from my home, an illegal alien fled the scene of an accident that he had caused, which killed a pregnant Mexican-American and critically injured her 11-year-old daughter. He is still at large. Within a 100-mile radius of central California, at least five citizens were killed by illegal alien gunmen in the last four months. When I go to town to drop off dry cleaning, I rarely hear English spoken. Almost all the stores in the shopping center (where I have gone for 50 years) have Spanish names. Few English signs are apparent or needed.

The formerly rich diverse community of Japanese-, Armenian-, Basque-, Portuguese-, Mexican- and Scandinavian-Americans have long since vanished. I stopped riding a bike in my rural environs four years ago, given the packs of unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs, and the owners' indifference to their attacks on passersby. From experience of driving each week across the Central Valley to the California coast, I assume that about one of every 20 cars at rural intersections will run the stop sign. I make the further assumption that if I am hit, the driver of the other car may well flee the scene and has no license, insurance or registration—and has never felt any real need to obtain them.

In my immediate rural environs, there is now the following: 1) an illegal dump of various junk, wrecked cars, and discarded household items; 2) a strange open-air vacant storage lot dotted with porta-potties, trailers and assorted junk spread over five acres; 3) a bizarre sort of camp, in which lean-tos, shacks, and tents are hidden among an old persimmon orchard, where no one quite knows how many such structures are hidden inside the mysterious grove; 4) a permanent hanging gardens of Babylon-type of yard sale where a home’s trees and bushes are littered with hanging clothing and flotsam and jetsam, some of them rotting from the recent rains; 5) a former backyard that is now a small goat mart; 6) an unlicensed, ad hoc outdoor barber shop; 7) an unlicensed, ad hoc outdoor daycare center.

...the avenue where I have lived for 65 years in terms of the fundamental metrics of civilization—sanitation, single-family zoning, building codes, mosquito abatement, dog licensing and registration, and sanctions for illicit activity—has regressed a half-century or more.

Officials apparently assume that visiting these places can become a lose-lose-lose situation: the miscreant will not comply with citations, the bureaucratic costs of enforcement are not offset by collectible fines, and the touchy subject of illegal immigration may earn either unfavorable press coverage or censure from politically sensitive county and local officials. In other words, we are a world away from Nancy Pelosi’s gated Napa estate, or Dianne Feinstein’s $40 million hilltop Pacific Heights mansion but not from the results of their ideology.

...If one reads either the local or regional papers, it is composed of stories about one of three themes.

One, the disturbing litany of DUIs, gang stabbings and shootings, fatal hit-and-run accidents, police shootings of armed suspects, high-speed chases, robberies, and drug busts.

Two, there are also many human interest inspirational stories of illegal aliens from Mexico who are running successful businesses, whose children are star athletes or students. The subtext is not that they are doing the exceptional things other Americans are not doing, but that they merit special attention and approbation because of their immigrant status and the obstacles they have overcome.

Three, the grievance or victimization meme: the lawsuit against law enforcement, the filing of a bias claim against the county, the firing of an official for some alleged insensitivity, or the injustice of some agency that has curtailed support from, tried to deport or was somehow biased against, an illegal alien.

The point is, that unlike the past, almost every new story is grounded in some sort of overt ethnic context, and ultimately related to illegal immigration and its effects.

Latino and Hispanic citizens, to the extent that they identify as such, may in the American Southwest be the key to the future of illegal immigration. So far, they have put up with higher taxes, swamped social services, gang activity, hit and run accidents and subpar schools that are the wages of illegal immigration, on the theory of ethnic solidarity and of general sympathy with the underclass of which many now in the middle class were once a part.

But no one wishes to have a neighbor who is an MS-13 member, or schools where non-English speakers hold back collective learning, or to be hit by an unlicensed driver who flees the scene. For successfully assimilated Hispanics there is a growing resentment that they are being used to support political agendas that are not conducive to improving the quality of life in their own backyards.

Translated that means, for example, that California’s high income, sales, and gas taxes, along with sky-high housing, electricity, and gasoline costs, do not make one sympathetic to millions who arrive illegally and without English skills or a high school diploma but with plenty of instant needs for state services.

In sum, either when Mexico resembles California, Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico, or when these border states resemble Mexico, then illegal immigration will likely cease.

...The other day I noticed for the first time that I have a lot more fear of an oncoming car in rural California than I had of intersections in Libya; a lot more worries about a wild stray dog wandering into my yard than I did while living in Greece; a lot more anxiety of being shot or robbed than I did when visiting the current Middle East; and a lot less hope of being treated promptly in extremis at the local emergency room than I would have expected in Eastern Europe.

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