Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson

a bed, not a room, garners as much or more. The woman who provides him sex, the local market that cashes his check for a cut, the used-car salesman who has him sign twenty-two pages of guarantees for a car with a cracked engine block - all these and more profit from the arms and back of the illegal alien.
    Soon he butts up against the bizarre and pricey world of white America - the strange country that sends things in the mail and on time like parking tickets, hospital bills and collection notices, and on occasion can haul away your car even as you sleep should you not pay the final $300. I have had dozens of aliens bring me all sorts of byzantme papers, from welfare applications to 1-9 forms; often they are bewildered and at times outraged that such mystic runes should apply to them and that I, with a Ph.D., cannot figure them out either. Better, they finally say after I have thrown up my hands, to ignore them - or in extremis hire a sharp Mexican abogado who knows the ropes.
    Such lawyers, in fact, abound for taking care of things that finally can no longer be put off - everything from workman's compensation claims to personal injury suits. Remember, the alien legal industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that ultimately depends on the backs of those picking, pruning and cleaning. Mostly, lawyers are there to "help" you find papers, bring up your mother, avoid jury duty, buy a house, start the process of citizenship, evade deportation - all at $100 an hour, "special" for a fellow paisano. The Fresno Bee is full of their ads. On Spanish-speaking television they are every bit as obnoxious as English-speaking shysters. They are amusing to the white legal community - snobs and fools who have no idea that a good Spanish-speaking lawyer with a mail-order degree who specializes in immigration or civil law can make far more than a Boalt Hall graduate in Sacramento's top firm.
    The alien realizes that even his nether world of undocumentation is still not so undocumented . Even if he sleeps in a southwest Fresno apartment building, paying $200 a month for ten hours' use of a bed; even if he catches a ride in a labor van for $10 round-trip; even if he buys beans and soda in bulk at Food-for-Less for $100 a month, there are still those who can steal his $3,000 roll of cash - legally and with impunity - and all in the noble service of keeping him in America, out of jail and away from notice. Rodrigo Pena, a brilliant crew boss, summed it up best for me something like this:
    There are only the two kinds who go to the bank - those to check on their money or those who go to get some. No m-betweens. $25,000 in cash a year isn't bad, but walk into a bank with that and try to get a loan, and they point you to the door. Mexicanos are the only people with cash stuffed in their pockets and still are worth no money.
    Chewey Escobar, now thirty-eight, whom I met when he was looking for work at fifteen, at last has noticed that all the people in the American Southwest who do the least sought-after work are, like himself, Mexicans - whether washing windows, making beds at the hotel, hauling trash or picking lettuce. Why is this so? Chewey has a vague idea that the absence of education, degrees, contacts, perfect English and years (if not centuries) of family roots in America can mean that you blow leaves while some pink person in slippers and bathrobe sips coffee and watches you from a glass-enclosed solarium by the pool.
    Someone like Chewey cannot help but think something like: "I work, she does not. I sweat and lift and pick, and they sit and talk." Envy, it turns out, is a powerful new force in the life of the alien - especially when so often he is not mixing with America's middling classes, but hired as a gardener, nanny or unskilled laborer by our more affluent. That I tell him there are millions of poor whites who far outnumber impoverished Mexican-Americans makes no impression; it is the contrast - Mexican help, white helped - that he is