Even if we accept that some Mexican-American leaders occasionally indulge in rhetorical excesses, their appeals to notions of race and reconquista still echo in mainstream politics. Consider the remarks of Richard Alatorre, a former member of the Los Angeles City Council: “They’re afraid we’re going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They’re right. We will take them over.” Mario Obledo, former California State Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jerry Brown — and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton — once infamously remarked, “California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave.” Speaking at a Latino gathering in 1995, Art Torres, then Chairman of the California Democratic Party, decried the passage of Proposition 187 denying entitlement benefits to those here illegally: “Power is not given to you. You have to take it. Remember, 187 is the last gasp of white America in California.”

Such pronouncements tend to be encouraged by contemporary group-rights liberalism. Both the French and American governments embrace multiculturalism, which exacerbates the problem and empowers racial chauvinists. Multiculturalism teaches that there is nothing really choiceworthy about the economic, social, and political core values of Western culture, given its historic sins of racism, class exploitation, and sexism. At its worst, multiculturalism can end up, as in France, allowing de facto polygamy among immigrants from North Africa (perhaps 15,000 such families), or, more mildly in the U.S., extenuating or even embracing Chicano student manifestos like this one from a MEChA website at San Jose State University:

Chicanismo involves a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of our cultural heritage…. By all means necessary, we Chicana/Chicano estudiantes of Aztlán, dedicate ourselves to taking our educational destiny into our own hands through the process of spreading Chicanismo, in the spirit of carnalismo…. As Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán, we are a nationalist movement of Indigenous Gente that lay claim to the land that is ours by birthright. As a nationalist movement we seek to free our people from the exploitation of an oppressive society that occupies our land.

Second-generation immigrants often take away from this student activism, multicultural school curriculum, government bureaucracy, and popular culture a mixed but mostly pernicious message: that long-standing prejudice intrinsic to a corrupt system is what keeps newcomers down; and consequently that self-esteem and self-confidence can only be imparted by a therapeutic course of study, airing past grievances and proposing new group compensation. Shunned is the idea that traditional education alone allows immigrants to master the host language, gain familiarity with the host country’s traditions and customs, and acquire enough science, math, and liberal arts to compete with long-standing natives.