'Mexifornia' Is a Tragedy in the Making

My hometown of Selma -- like most other communities in rural Central California -- used to be a stable municipality. Immigrants from Europe, Japan, China, Armenia, the Punjab and Mexico flocked here to farm and prospered from their hard work, acumen and the natural bounty of the San Joaquin Valley. They came in one-time waves, under legal auspices and, within one or two generations, emerged as assimilated English-speaking citizens.

By 1970, Selma was a rich, multiracial society bound together by a cohesive and common culture.

That dream is now slipping away. Here in Central California, we have de facto apartheid towns made up almost exclusively of Mexican immigrants. Many are illegal residents who do not speak English and cannot and do not participate in the civic life of the state -- voting, community service organizations and jury duty.

There are manifest signs of social turmoil, the wages of illegality. Police squad cars have chased down our driveway after an illegal immigrant suspected of running a methamphetamine lab. Rare species on the farm -- great-horned owls, kit foxes, red-tailed hawks -- have been shot and left to rot, sport for members of local Latino gangs, by the sheriff's reckoning. After my families spent five generations on the same land, I am no longer sure our children can or should live on what now seems like a wide-open frontier.

If the old way of measured and legal immigration, coupled with assimilationist policies, led to a melting pot, today's open borders and the force-multiplying effect of a multicultural agenda have led to segregation in the schools and an alternate legal universe designed to accommodate the foreign culture of thousands.

Indeed, our exasperated and bankrupt state seeks to provide illegal residents with tuition discounts in preference to out-of-state American citizens, special driver's licenses, bilingual government services and other creative exemptions in lieu of simply stemming the illegal tide and relying on the old method of turning foreigners into Americans.

We're not supposed to talk about all this, but we are sorely in need of an honest national discussion. The left in the universities, politics and the media seems to find advantage in promoting an unassimilated -- and exploding -- constituency that requires leadership.