The most callous in fact, the most caring in theory?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

How could California square its present circle of being both the most impoverished and affluent of states—the most callous in fact, the most caring in theory?

Why not cease the current stampede to private academies that has left the public schools of the greater coastal corridor non-diverse and near-apartheid?

The huge Los Angeles Unified School District is now more than 70 percent Latino, as whites and Asians have fled the arrival of immigrant children. It’s much the same in Silicon Valley, where private prep schools are expanding enrollments to meet the demand from the affluent members of the tech industry.

...Instead, despite the rhetoric of inclusion, and televised and tweeted fury at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the progressive left coast is among the most exclusionary of all American communities.

One of the strangest scenes in impoverished rural Fresno County, where I live, is the epidemic of substandard housing. Almost every small old farmhouse now has trailers and shacks tacked on to them—all substandard and not meeting codes—to accommodate recent waves of new immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Yet the media often showcase the huge gated homes and enclaves of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the journalistic elite. Surely some of all that unused square footage and those guest houses could be used to offer at least temporary hospitality to those in need.

Actor Peter Fonda could do far better to help immigrants than by tweeting threats to 12-year-old Barron Trump from his most non-diverse ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana. Instead, Fonda might advocate that Hollywood actors live among newly arrived immigrants, associate with them as equals rather than as the help, and promote public schools by ensuring that their own children and grandchildren attend them.

Better yet, why doesn’t Fonda invite a few of the immigrant families awaiting word on their legal status to the open spaces of his Montana ranch? Media accounts of his expansive and tasteful digs show an infrastructure that easily could accommodate a few needy immigrant families.

It is easy to invoke the Nazis and the Holocaust to express anger at the temporary detention of children and their families who have entered the U.S. illegally. It would be far more meaningful if marquee journalists, actors, academics, and activists knew immigrants not just as a distant abstract cause, or as nannies and landscapers, but as their neighbors, their children’s school friends—and as their social equals.

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