Part history, part political analysis, and part memoir, Mexifornia is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Victor Davis Hanson, known for his military histories and his social commentary, is a fifth-generation Californian who lives on a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies on the decline of agrarianism, Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything. Here too, he ponders what has changed in California over the past quarter century, examining how the state and the Southwest more broadly—indeed, the entire nation—have been altered by hemorrhaging borders.

Hanson admires the ambition and vigor of immigrants who have helped make California strong, but he indicts the disordered immigration policies that led to the present mess. He also illuminates the ways those policies are harmful to people who have come from Mexico and Central America seeking a better life in the United States.

Nearly twenty years after the first publication of Mexifornia, Hanson offers an update on the continuing tragedy of illegal immigration. At the same time, he remains hopeful that our traditions of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament created by politicians and ideologues.