Over the years, I've enjoyed reading essays and books by Richard Rodriguez and Victor Davis Hanson. Each is an interesting personality and thinker and now they're punching at each other over the issue of illegal immigration.
Earlier, I posted the link to Richard Rodriguez’s Cato Unbound essay on Mexicans in America.
An excerpt:
Another academic, Victor Davis Hanson, distinguishes himself among disgruntled white voices from the nativist bookshelf, because he is a farmer. Hanson has worked alongside Mexican peasants in California. He knows the fury of their labor. Hanson grouses when a drunk Mexican kid runs a car into a ditch on Hanson’s property and abandons it there—a scene John Steinbeck would have treated as tragic and comic. Hanson sees just another mess to clean up. He is not wrong. He is ungenerous.
Now, here is Victor Davis Hanson’s response. An excerpt:
Rodriguez also offers the same cartoon of my own work, and he gives that game away with the buzz nouns and meaningless adjectives so often tossed about by the race industry— "white," "nativist," "peasants," etc. He thinks I am "ungenerous’ in being angry when a "kid" damages my property. But most of the illegal alien "kids" that I have seen over the last twenty years are those that I taught and tutored classics to at Cal State Fresno. In fact, I have had not one "kid," but five adult aliens ram their vehicles into our vineyards and orchards, all fleeing the scene, but leaving behind only their unregistered and uninsured wrecked cars that have done over $50,000 in aggregate damage.
[If you've got the time, don't just read the excerpts. Each of the essays is worthwhile.]
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