Caputo on the border
You may remember reporter and novelist PHILIP CAPUTO from his classic Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War. He's now writing about the border in the Virginia Quarterly Review:
"The concerns that nativists voice—migrants take jobs from native-born Americans, drive down wages, strain health and social services—are valid, and there are plenty of studies to support them; but these issues camouflage a deeper, darker fear that Arizona and the whole Southwest is becoming “Mexicanized.” What they ignore is that the immigrants are becoming “Americanized” at the same time, just as Asian and southern and eastern Europeans were a hundred years ago. This is the whole story of America—immigrants change its character, it changes the immigrants."