Posted on 06/27/2018 8:12:01 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . . Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.
Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.
Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.
Mexico, the Aggressor
Facts are stubborn and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts. Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., larger than that of any other single American trade partner (including Japan and Germany) except China. The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.
A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.
In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law.
What is also unsaid is that many of the millions of Mexican expatriates in the United States who send remittances home to Mexico are themselves beneficiaries of some sort of U.S. federal, state, or local support that allows them to free up cash to send back to Mexico.
When Obrador urges his fellow citizens to abandon their country and head illegally into the United States, his primary concern is not their general welfare and futures. He seems quite unconcerned that those who send home remittances live in poverty in the United States and seek offsetting subsidies from the U.S. government to find enough disposable income to save the Mexican government from its mostly corrupt self.
Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.
There may now be anywhere from 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S. America’s open border is the keystone of Mexican foreign and domestic policy. For all practical purposes, Mexico City alone modulates the flow of both Mexican and Central American citizens into the United States — depending on its current attitude toward the U.S.
Mexico plays the same role with the Unites States that North African countries play with Europe, except in the former’s case, it has a deliberate rather than chaotic emigration policy — and uses it as direct leverage over the U.S. Mexico’s sense of immigration entitlement is predicated on the assumption that corporate America wants cheap labor, that liberal America wants voters, that identity-politics activists need constituents, that a liberal elite expresses its abstract virtue by its patronization of the Other — and that until recently most Americans were indifferent.
Conservatives, who object to waves of illegal aliens swarming the border, earn boilerplate slurs that they are cruel, racist, nativist, xenophobic, selfish, and anti-humanitarian. Open-borders liberals, who once expressed opposition to illegal immigration, take their cues from the concrete recent record showing that almost all impoverished immigrants fuel progressive agendas of big government, redistribution, and entitlements that otherwise have run out of gas.
Exporting human capital — most illegal Mexican immigrants are now from southern Mexican and indigenous people — has long acted as a political safety valve for the Mexican government. Its grandees are largely the descendants of European aristocrats and have shown little desire to enact the constitutional, human-rights, and economic reforms that they assume are the norm in the U.S. and that might help Mexican citizens live safely and profitably in their own homeland. Certainly, there appears to be little real self-reflection in Mexico about how and why such a naturally rich country — blessed with good soil, climate, natural resources, ports, and a strategic geography — remains so dismally poor.
Illegal immigration provides a useful and nearly perpetual demographic for Mexico inside the U.S. About 12 percent of the Mexican population now lives inside the United States, the great majority illegally. Los Angeles may be the second-largest city of Mexican nationals in the world. Of all U.S. immigrants, legal and not, it is estimated that more than 30 percent come from Mexico, and another quarter arrived from Central America through Mexico.
The activist expatriate community also insidiously pressures the U.S. to a more pro-Mexican foreign policy. The Democratic party has discovered — especially since 2008, the watershed year in which the Obamas and most of the Democratic party institutionalized the idea of illegal immigration recalibrating the Electoral College — that open borders provide a steady stream of potential first- and secure second-generation voters who in the past have flipped red states blue (such as California, New Mexico, and Nevada). The careers of identity-politics activists often hinge on having a permanent pool of poor, unskilled, and minimum-wage-earning constituents who need collective representation by self-appointed advocates. Without illegal immigration, Chicano or La Raza studies would in a few years resonate about as much as a Polish- or Italian-studies department.
Only in the U.S. would an illegal immigrant cross the border on Monday and in theory be eligible for affirmative action on Tuesday. Supposedly, a racist and bigoted America owes an illegal alien and his children employment or education reparations for their own deprived childhoods in Mexico, or as recompense for the racism they will soon inevitably encounter in the U.S., a bias that apparently did not bother millions when they chose to leave their own country and cross the border illegally.
The existential worry of both identity-politics activists and the new Democratic party is an immigration that is diverse, legal, meritocratic, and measured. The second-greatest fear is a return of the melting pot and the end of the salad bowl, given that assimilation, integration, and intermarriage might turn a useful bloc of Hispanics immigrants into something like 20th-century Italian immigrants, who eventually assimilated and whose politics were no longer predictable.
Mexican foreign policy has been as brilliant as it has been cynical. Its signature theme has been an Art of the Deal politicking to harangue the U.S. about its supposedly illiberal treatment of Mexicans, whom Mexico itself has illiberally treated as a way of facilitating even more illegal immigration. The more the U.S. is on the apologetic defensive, and the more it has to prove its global humanitarian fides — the more it is likely to suspend its own immigration law and allow in more Mexican citizens without legal authorization. In one of the strangest paradoxes of the present age, Mexico seems to love its people more, the farther they are from Mexico and the longer they stay away. And that convenient love is requited: The longer illegal aliens are in the U.S., the more they can afford to become staunch pro-Mexican adherents — again, as long as they do not have to return to Mexico.
We are warned by Obrador that a new relationship with the U.S. in on the horizon, and pundits warn us that six of ten Mexican now view the U.S. unfavorably. But what exactly would a new militant anti-U.S. policy look like, given that the current relationship is already so lopsided in favor of Mexico?
There are several U.S. concessions to Mexico that a nationalist Obrador should logically pursue if he were truly an anti-American activist of the Venezuelan, Cuban, or Nicaraguan brand. He might demand repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens currently in American jails. He could call for the repatriation of the 11 million to 20 million Mexicans living in the U.S. Obrador could either leave NAFTA or demand increases in Mexico’s astounding $71 billion trade surpluses with the U.S. And, of course, he could put an end to remittances, arguing that the $30 billion that Mexican nationals sends home is a burden on Mexico’s exploited expatriate poor and should cease. Promises, promises . . .
In sum, Obrador is in a surreal position. He is posing as an anti-American, to channel popular anger at Trump, while at the same time assuming that an obtuse United States will continue to tolerate open borders, billions of dollars in remittances, interference in U.S. politics, huge trade deficits — and somewhere between 11 million and 20 million illegal aliens inside the United States.
More at site
One word: Mexicans
Most Mexicans share Obrador’s view that they have a right to ignore our laws and borders.
The oligarchy lives in an affluent bell jar, hermetically sealed against the masses seething beneath them. It is plain to see that the government of Mexico could not care less about a single one of the wretches they heave up against our borders. To expect anything of them is folly, as the obtuse and corrupt Bush regime amply illustrated. Best to just build the frickin wall and stop the influx of unsocialized pollution.
Mexico hasn’t gotten over the loss of a war just like Hillary can’t get over losing the election
No, that’s not true. I’m actually surprised at how good Mexicans are - they show up for work, they do a good job and they would actually like to be part of this country.
The problem is the Mexican government, which is hand in glove with Mexican criminal organizations, mostly through their connections with Mexican civil service unions (think SEIU). Of course, the civil servants actually don’t provide any services: there is no potable water in most Mexican cities, crime is unpunished if you’re the right kind of criminal, and government jobs, including teaching, are sold to the highest bidder.
When it feels threatened, the teachers’ union goes out and burns tires and throws stones in Oaxaca, a southern state where Acapulco is located, a formerly nice place, and in fact the civil service unions are the big leaders in all the violence in Mexico and protect and are protected by the drug gangs, which smuggle drugs and people from Central America. Of course, Mexico won’t take accept the Central Americans as immigrants, and as for the drugs, they obviously just wave them on by.
More than 100 Mexican politicians (reformers) were killed last year by the drug gangs.
One thing we shouldn’t forget is that Mexico is technically, according to its constitution, a Socialist country. And therein lies the problem.
Trump should have our Mexican embassy hand deliver a preditor drone image of Obrador’s motorcade as a hint on how we plan on solving this issue.
A South American gentleman once told my dad that those who settled south of the Rio Grande came looking for gold. Those who settled north came looking for God. And they both found what they were seeking.
later
Obrador is the perfect President for Mexico now, with Trump in office.
Because what he wants....The Wall. Can only be obtained when Obrador is President.
Watch.
He’s a mental midget, and stuck on Reconquista now (because all his other stupid ideas didn’t stick on many other tries).
So, he’s going to make a lot of noise about Mexicans taking back their land. Trump’s gonna be like.....Nah, bro....The Wall. ‘Murica gonna see that, and agree.
Imma buy stocks in Kleenex. Tears for 8 years has got to generate some profit.
“Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. “
Actually, he said all Mexicans and all peoples South of Mexico have that human right, meaning he’s going to help people come on through Mexico to the US.
No human right to come from Central America to settle in mexico, apparently.
“””I’m actually surprised at how good Mexicans are”””
Yeah right. Check here to see ‘how good Mexicans are’
http://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/?s=mexican
http://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/?s=mexico
What if 60 million americans flooded into mexico? How would they enjoy that?
Ping
Excellent article, would this ever appear on the RAT Underground? Been there a few times and made me nauseous. Does FR have moles that post articles such as this there and is it allowed, does it stay posted?
Mexico: When are we going to step on that bug?
I hear they have quiet beaches.
Nah, it’s not a bug man. I like Mexico.
In Mexico.
Obrador’s election is going to tell us, essentially....that the majority of Mexicans think they have a right to just come here. Whenever.
Then we get our The Wall.
Then we can talk about immigration numbers. SC decision says he can stop immigration completely from Mexico right now if he thinks it’s to the benefit of the US.
Oh.
We are so far on top I’m not sure what to do right now.
Getting kinda dizzy.
I think I liked Commies more when they built walls to keep their people in.
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