| | |  Entertainment | Books | April 2009 
Immigration Issues Top Mexico Book Club’s Reading Recommendations for April
 Ed Hutmacher - MexicoBookClub.com
Who doesn't have an opinion about illegal immigration? Even if you're not sure on which side of the vitriolic debate you stand, we can all agree that immigration is one of the thorniest hot-button issues yet to play out in the ongoing love-hate relationship between Mexico and the United States. Below are three good books that underscore the prickly problem.
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle (1995/Penguin Group/Fiction) — First published in 1995, shortly after California passed its controversial Proposition 187 law denying public benefits to illegal aliens, T.C. Boyle's best-seller The Tortilla Curtain has since become a contemporary classic. It’s a fictional tale of two wildly disparate California couples on a collision course in the pursuit of the American Dream. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an affluent yuppie-ordered lifestyle in a gated hilltop community seemingly inoculated against the abhorrent human and natural elements that threaten to encroach on their cozy existence. Undocumented and destitute Mexican immigrants Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their dream of a better life in the U.S. as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp in the ravine below the well-to-do Mossbachers. From the moment a freak accident brings the two couples into intimate contact, their opposing worlds become entwined in what becomes a tragic comedy of cultural misunderstanding — both couples have their own version of the American Dream, conflicting ideas about material success, individual responsibility and equal opportunity. In the United States, which defines itself as a nation of immigrants, Boyle's fable questions who gets to slam the door on whom and reminds us that while the American Dream may seem ideal, nothing is ever as fulfilling as it is anticipated.
The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea (2005/Little, Brown & Company/Non-fiction) — In May 2001, twenty-six men from Veracruz, Mexico launched a risky expedition to illegally cross the Mexican-U.S. border into Arizona via the deadliest route imaginable, a corridor called the Devil's Highway. Misled and abandoned in the hellish desert by merciless "coyotes" hired as guides, only twelve men survived the ordeal. News of their harrowing journey might easily have been dismissed by jaded Americans as just another bad thing that happens if it weren't for Urrea's award-winning literary exposé. In The Devil's Highway, Urrea achieves a lot of things, but maybe the most important is putting a human face on the anonymous immigration statistics by giving the victims their identities as husbands, fathers, sons and brothers with names, honorable histories and worthy dreams. At times poetic and then horrific, the story is both epic in scope — a trek through Mexico's desolate wilderness in search of the promised land — and intensely personal — a survival story that has the depth of genuine tragedy. When overheated rhetoric of one sort or another swamps any clear sense of the human stakes involved with the immigration question, this book will alert readers to the profound consequences.
The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's by Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga (2007/Ivan R. Dee Publishers/Non-Fiction) — Here is a book we recommend principally because of its incisive, though controversial, conclusions: that no matter how hard average Mexican immigrants work at their mostly menial jobs, they will add less to U.S. national wealth than they cost the taxpayers for their health care, the education of their children and, too often, incarceration. To most of us, this flies in the face of what is generally published, broadcast and promoted by the mainstream media where sympathizers to open borders and unrestricted access to U.S. social services abound. Unless you're of the Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan persuasion, a book such as The Immigration Solution won't likely appeal to readers, and will probably be dismissed out of hand by pro-immigration enthusiasts. Which is a shame. Absent any sentimentality and demagoguery, The Immigration Solution is an excellent summary of the economic, sociological and historical interplay that reverberates throughout the immigration debate, and proposes that the U.S. should adhere to the same kind of immigration policy in place in other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the basis of what immigrants can do for the country, not what the country can do for them. The authors' suggestions are serious, provocative and worthy of careful thought for anyone seeking an informed opinion on this vital issue.
Ed Hutmacher is Editor and Chief of Mexico Book Club. Also reviewed this month, Opening the Borders: Solving the Mexico-U.S. Immigration Problem for Our Sake and Mexico’s by Larry Blasko, and The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Illegal Immigration, Drugs and Homeland Security by Tony Payan. For more information on these and other books with Mexico-related themes, visit the website at MexicoBookClub.com. |
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