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." Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "Victor Davis Hanson brings a lifetime of experience in California's Central Valley to this indictment of multiculturalism and mass immigration." -- Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies"Hanson's 'Mexifornia' is that rare book that combines scholarship with personal experience to provide genuine insight into a complex issue." -- Linda Chavez, author of An Unlikely Conservative About the Author Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist at California State University, Fresno, is author most recently of "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power" and "An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terror." From AudioFile Hanson, a professor of classics at Cal State Fresno and a columnist for NATIONAL REVIEW, lives on the land his family has farmed for generations. This work is a clear examination of the present situation regarding illegal immigration from Mexico. Although the author gives several possible solutions to the problem, his main contention is that the only wise course of action is to assimilate the immigrants into the larger culture, as happened with other waves of immigrants in our nation's past. James has a steady and calm voice. Adroit with both Spanish and English, he is appropriately expressive throughout this production. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Read more