ABOUT THE BOOK

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Classics professor Hanson is also, like generations of his family before him, a fruit farmer in California's central valley. He has employed immigrants, seen them flood his community during the last 30 years of mass flight from Mexico, and endured the crime associated with illegal immigrants.

Hanson is immensely sympathetic to poor Mexicans, however, and the most powerful chapter here outlines the harried life of the illegal alien. But he hates to see the ordered culture in which he grew up drowned by an alien inundation whose undeserving beneficiaries are Mexico's kleptocratic rulers, for whom an open border is a safety valve expelling the potential for democratic change.

The four solutions to the mess that Hanson enumerates include continuing de facto open borders but insisting on rapid acculturation; patrolling the border effectively and reducing legal immigration; imposing "sweeping restrictions on immigration" and ending Mexican chauvinism in the U.S.; and allowing present policies to make California increasingly mirror an unreformed Mexico.

Hanson thinks that the U.S. "still need not do everything right" to prevent social collapse in the Southwest and that the totalitarian uniformity of valueless mass culture may soften that collapse.

He also sees very clearly what has brought this crisis on: the American globalist ideology's lust for cheap labor and emphasis on "raw inclusiveness" instead of "standards and taste."

Linda Chavez, author of An Unlikely Conservative
"Hanson's 'Mexifornia' is that rare book that combines scholarship with personal experience to provide genuine insight into a complex issue."

From The Critics
The Los Angeles Times

Hanson's primary worry is steadily rising illegal immigration into a welfare state with expanding entitlements and waning commitment to the history and virtues of Western civilization, an admittedly imperfect, coercive consensus that nonetheless held together a uniquely successful, multiethnic nation. The emerging Mexifornia is becoming "not quite Mexico and not quite America either."

A reader's review:
Mexifornia - welcome to the new 3rd World.

Politically inkorrect to the Liberal masses, this book hits the nail on the head. Accurately portraying present day California where society and education discriminates against the intelligent and the hardworking in favor of the unskilled masses.

Mexifornia is slightly ahead of 3rd world Mexico and far, far, far less than the USA of old. It's living proof of what happens when those living on welfare 'entitlement' outnumber those barely able to pay the taxes to support them. However it fails to address the issue of why a minority should work their behinds off to pay (in taxes) for a majority to sit on theirs. This is a must-read for anyone planning to stay in California.