"Massive illegal immigration from Mexico into California," writes Victor Davis Hanson, "coupled with a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans, is changing the very nature of the state. Yet we Californians have been inadequate in meeting this challenge, failing both to control our borders with Mexico and to integrate the new alien population into our mainstream." Noted for his military histories and his social commentary on post-9/11 American life, Hanson is a fifth-generation Californian who teaches college classics courses and runs a family farm. Mexifornia is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter-century, and how the real losers in the chaos caused by hemorrhaging borders are Mexican immigrants themselves. A large part of the problem, Hanson believes, is the opportunistic coalition that stymies immigration reform and stifles honest discussion of the issue. Corporations, contractors and agribusiness demand cheap wage labor from Mexico, whatever the social consequences. Meanwhile, academics, journalists, government bureaucrats and La Raza advocates see illegal aliens as a vast new political constituency for those committed to the notion that victimhood, is the key to advancement. But Hanson believes that our traditions of assimilation, integration and intermarriage may yet remedy a problem that politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand.

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.

An intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter-century; Hanson shows how the real losers in the chaos caused by hemorrhaging borders are Mexican immigrants themselves.