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Old stereotypes die hard. How many
times have we heard that Mexican and Hispanic
immigration is good for the U.S., because Mexican and
other Hispanic immigrants (including illegal aliens)
have "family values"?
Our own president is particularly fond of this argument. For example, at a National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in 2006, Bush
proclaimed (to applause) that
"The daily example of our Hispanic
communities reminds us that strong faith and strong
families can build a better future for all. We are
more—we're a more hopeful society because men and women
of Hispanic descent have put their faith and values into action."
Some go so far as
to say that Hispanics are just better people than
Americans and are going to improve the moral fiber of
our country.
In fact, as long
ago as 1993, Francis "End
of History" Fukuyama said that
“But
it would also seem a priori likely that third-world
immigrants should have stronger family values than
white, middle-class, suburban Americans, while their
work ethic and willingness to defer to traditional
sources of authority should be greater as well.” [Immigrants
and Family Values, Commentary, May 1993]
In 2003, former
Mexican political operative Fredo Arias-King described interviewing pro-immigration social conservative U.S.
congressmen on behalf of the PAN Party and Vicente
Fox. Here's his impression of why they supported
immigration:
"Congressmen in this group mentioned
that the immigrants ‘bring family values’ that
compensate for the perceived deterioration in the morality of Americans. Their preoccupation seemed to
be a return to an America they feel is slipping away."
Contributor
Allan
Wall
Allan Wall recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He currently resides in Mexico, where he has lived since 1991. He can be reached via e-mail at allan39@prodigy.net.mx [go to Wall index] |
That argument is
downright un-patriotic, I don't care who makes it.
If you believe
that the moral fiber of American society has declined,
and I do, then the solution is to work to improve it,
not to replace Americans with foreigners.
Any social
conservative who wants to replace Americans with foreigners is an unpatriotic
social conservative.
But, as it
turns out, the argument is bogus even on its own terms.
Mass immigration is definitely not improving the moral
fiber of American society.
As VDARE.COM's Edwin Rubenstein has documented, Hispanic women in the U.S. have higher
illegitimacy and abortion rates than white women. That's
quite an accomplishment when you think about it!
Nevertheless, some clueless pro-lifers support mass immigration, despite the
fact that mass immigration increases the American
abortion rate! Figure that out!
Another argument: Mexicans have
wonderful family values, but immigrants to the U.S. who have these social problems are being corrupted by
American society.
As Fukuyama put it in a review of Huntington's Who Are We? ,
"The
problem, as Alejandro Portes, [Email]
a professor of sociology and immigration studies at
Princeton, has pointed out, is not that Mexican and other Latino
immigrants come with the wrong values, but rather that
they are corrupted by American practices."
And "Crunchy Con" Rod Dreher echoed the
argument in a Beliefnet blog entry entitled "Leaving
Mexico—and Strong Family Values":
"I
heard from a Catholic friend today …(who) said that in
his charity work, they're seeing lots of Mexican
immigrant families shattered by the experience of living
in America. Mostly men leaving their wives and children, but a startling number of
women leaving their husbands and children. His theory is
that the strength of the Mexican family is true... but
only in Mexico. When they immigrate here, to a vastly
different culture and lose their cultural reference
points, many immigrants can't handle the freedom. He
said they're seeing so many become unmoored from the
kinds of traditions and restraints that probably kept
them sound in Mexico, but which many of them cast aside
once they get to America."
Well, there's a little truth
to this argument. Mexican immigrants to the U.S. do have higher illegitimacy rates in the U.S. than Mexicans do at home.
But, on the other hand, Fukuyama
and Dreher don’t seem to realize that illegitimacy rates in Mexico are in fact higher than rates in the U.S. overall. (More on that
later).
The problem with the "Immigrants Corrupted by America" argument is that it goes
too far in implying that Mexico is some sort of Family
Values Moral Arcadia. As I've tried to tell people since my very first VDARE.COM article in 2001, there are
all sorts of home-grown social problems in Mexico.
Mexican society is not immune to the vast social changes
occurring in other countries. Today social and moral
values are under dispute in Mexico, as in other
countries.
On balance, there's simply no
reason to suppose that the current mass immigration of
Mexicans and other Hispanics is going to improve the
moral fiber of our own country.
And hey, I'm not the only one who
is pointing out the social problems of Mexico—the Catholic Church is concerned about them as well. A
recent article in El Universal, Mexico's paper of
record, was entitled Preocupa a Iglesia descomposición
social en México (“Social
decomposition worries the Church”, April 2nd,
2008). It started out by reporting that
"The
bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel stated that the
greatest concern of the [Catholic] church is not
the decline in the numbers of Catholics, ‘but the
lifestyle of many of them, the situation of violence and
social decomposition.’ He [Bishop Arizmendi] said
that the young people grow up disoriented, without a
well-defined paternal figure, without personal identity
and without hope, taking refuge in drugs, sex, videos, music and fashion."
The Mexican youth the bishop is
discussing, remember, are young Mexicans who live in
Mexico—not those who have migrated to the U.S.
As a high school teacher and
college professor, I'm well aware that American pop
culture is very popular with young Mexicans. They listen
to American music and watch American TV shows and
movies. My students are much more familiar with
contemporary American pop music than I am (but I don't
think I'm missing much).
I freely admit that commercial American pop culture contains many bad influences for Mexican youth. But, if you
know anything about Mexican pop culture and its
celebrities, you know it's just as decadent.
It was recently announced,
incidentally, that Mexico is now #2 in the world in the
quantity of Internet child pornography published. [Ocupa
México segundo lugar en producción de pornografía
infantil, El Universal, June 2, 2008]
As far as divorce rates, Mexico
still lags behind the U.S., which has one of the world's
highest (36 for every 100 marriages as of 2005).
Nevertheless, Mexico's divorce rate
is increasing, and quite substantially. Just having
lived here since 1991, I've seen the marriages of
couples I know fall apart. And looking at it percentage-wise, in 1970 there were
3.2 divorces for every 100 marriages, in 1980 there were
4.4, in 1990 there were 7.2, in 2000 there were 7.4, by
2003 there were 11.0, in 2004 there were 11.8 and by 2006, for every 100 marriages there were 12.3
divorces.
In other words, the Mexican divorce
rate has quadrupled since 1970. The U.S. is still far
ahead, but Mexico is working to close the gap.
During the same time period,
illegitimate births have increased in Mexico.
They've increased in the United
States too. According to UN statistics, in 1970 out-of -wedlock
births accounted for 10.7% of U.S. births; by 1999 they
had climbed to 33.0%, and by 2006 had reached an all-time high of 37%. Which
is sad and disturbing.
But even back in 1970, the Mexican
out-of-wedlock percentage of all births, 27.3%, was
already higher than that of the U.S. And by 1993 the
percentage of illegitimate births out of total births
was 37.8%.
There's even a curious Spanish
euphemism for a bastard child—the baby is called an "hijo natural" (natural child), as if
to imply that legitimate offspring are somehow
unnatural! (A term also used by pre-Victorian English aristocrats, but no longer much used in
English.)
There was a recent publicized case
of a "natural" child who was born to two very
famous white Mexicans.
Santiago Creel (see photo here) is a prominent politician of the right-wing
(by Mexican standards) PAN (National
Action Party). Creel was former president Vicente
Fox's handpicked successor, but was defeated in the
party selection process by Felipe Calderon, who went on
to win. Now Creel is president of the Senate, the
Mexican equivalent of Harry Reid (but Creel is whiter).
In 2004, Mexican actress Edith
Gonzalez (photo here) gave birth to a daughter. As sometimes occurs
with single Mexican female celebrities who get pregnant,
she refused to reveal who the baby's father was.
Well, Creel just got around to admitting that he is the
father of the child, conceived when Creel was Secretary
of the Interior and married to another woman. The reason
it was discovered: Edith and Santiago (who are no longer
in a relationship, Creel is divorced and has a new
girlfriend) finally got around to registering Constanza,
their blue-eyed child, in 2008, though she was born in
2004. Now those are some real family values for you!
(Mother and daughter photo here ).
Despite some attention in the
celebrity press, it wasn't even considered much of a
scandal. I think it would've been a bigger scandal in
the United States.
In recent years, the number of out-of-wedlock births
and female-headed households has increased in Mexico.
But most Mexican single moms
are not as well-heeled as Edith Gonzalez.
As of 2003, in the U.S. 8% of
households with children were female-headed. This year, CONAPO (Mexican Population Council) reported that
as of 2000, 20.6% of Mexican homes were female-headed.
That was up from 13.5% at the end of the 70s.
And in 2007 CONAPO announced that 23% of Mexican
households were female-headed.
In 2006, CONAPO (Mexican Population
Council) reported that 20% of Mexican mothers are (for
whatever reason) single mothers. Among younger women
(under 30), one out of five got pregnant when they were
single. [Madres
solteras desafían estereotipos, (“Single
Mothers Defy Stereotypes”—itself
a very stereotypical headline.)By Cristina
Pérez-Stadelmann, El Universal, August 30 2006]
Some other telling statistics [PDF]
from CONAPO: Of the nearly 2 million births in Mexico in
2008, 15.5% were to females between the ages of 15-19,
and around 7,000 girls from 12-14 years of age had had at least one child.
So how about abortion? On paper, Mexican abortion law is stricter than U.S.
law. But Mexican abortion law is hardly enforced.
Estimates of how many illegal
abortions are performed vary wildly. But some activists on both sides agree that there
are somewhere between 500,000 to 1.5 million abortions
performed annually in Mexico. If true, that would be
comparable to the number of annual legal abortions in
the United States—which has three times Mexico's
population.
And just last year the Mexico City
municipal government legalized abortion on demand for
the first trimester.
Regarding the spread of HIV, a recent study carried out in rural Mexico cast the
local men in a very unflattering light. The purpose of
the study was "to investigate the
factors that outline HIV risk among married women in…one of Mexico's
rural communities." Marital
infidelity by the husbands was the principal factor in
HIV infection among the wives.
And it was
related to migration both within Mexico and in the
U.S.:
"A major aspect in the study was that
married men in the community left their homes to travel
to the United States or large Mexican cities for jobs.
While away for long periods, they engaged in extra-marital and unsafe sex, which can lead to HIV
infection. When men return home, they infect their wives
with the deadly virus during sexual intercourse."
This leads once
again to the emigration factor—how mass emigration of
Mexican men worsens family disintegration in Mexico.
Besides HIV infections, it encourages some men to
abandon their families, as I reported in my 2004 article "Deadbeat Dads Don't Stop at the Rio Grande".
Allowing mass
emigration from Mexico exacerbates family disintegration
and causes all sorts of problems for family members left
behind.
To provide just on
example, in one of the schools in which I worked, I had
a divorced co-worker whose ex-husband never sent her any
sort of alimony or child support for her or for their
daughter.
Why? Because he was
living in the U.S. and nobody could (or would) track him
down.
How many other
Mexican women and children are in similar situations—or
worse? These are the victims that the Open Borders lobby doesn't give a hoot about. That's
why they try to change the subject and smear immigration reform patriots, lobbing
accusations of "racism" and other such red herrings.
Certainly,
contemporary American society has many social problems,
and it's not fair to blame them all on immigration.
Nevertheless, there
is not one of our social problems that is
improved by immigration. Instead, immigration is making
existing problems worse.
Don't
be deceived. Today's mass Mexican immigration—the “Mexodus”—is
not improving the moral fiber of the U.S.A.
Nor of Mexico
either. CRO
first appeared at Vdare
copyright
2008 Allan Wall
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