Victor Davis Hanson on the Cali-Recall elections (in an article that provides an excellent summary of his book Mexifornia):

In the recent California recall election, a first-generation immigrant from Austria—a candidate who arrived here penniless and has a heavy accent that seems right out of a bad World War II movie, but who became an up-by-his-bootstraps business success—was caricatured as a nativist and near-racist for supporting legal and measured immigration. Meanwhile, a third-generation Hispanic candidate—a man who grew up as Mike, not Cruz, Bustamante, speaking English in a California suburb—reinvented himself as the emblem of the Mexican Diaspora. Only in the poisonous atmosphere of today’s identity politics could the immigrant be slandered as the nativist and the native deified as the immigrant.