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
Yeah...they do have a more cockroachy feel to them these days.
How you guys surviving out there in dfwland?
Screaming loonies from my state overwhelmed you yet?
Sorry.
They won’t approve my tag application for sillyleftiesleaving.
SOME Mexicans show up for work and some do a good job. Some would like to be a part of this country. I know for a fact some are also hardened criminals, and some are welfare leaches, and some are loyal only to Mexico and see themselves as colonizing to regain land they lost. Mexicans are not all perfect, just as US citizens are not all bad. Amazing how that works.
Mexico is hostile to the United States. We are under attack the same as Pearl Harbor, they are just using different weapons. We need to declare them a hostile nation and a threat to national security then the President can send the full force of the US military to the border.
Isn’t he a communist?
After oil revenues ....;cash transfers is the second biggest source of $$$ for Mexico.
We SHOULD slap a hefty fee soon this wires out of the country.
In 1836 Texas rebelled. This ultimately resulted in the Mexican American war of 1846. The Mexican upper classes refused to fight and Winfield Scott took Mexico City with a force a fraction of the size of the Mexican army and 2000 miles from his base of supply. After the defeat, Mexico lost half their territory under the terms of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Mexicans have never been sanguine about this. While this was going on Queen Victoria's minions in British Honduras (Belize) were making a killing, selling obsolete Brown Bess flintlock muskets to the Maya (See North Dakota in 1876 for a similar practice).
Following the war Mexico was bankrupt. They borrowed a lot of money from the French that they couldn't pay back and in 1862 Napoleon III essentially repo'ed the country. This set off a 5 year revolutionary struggle which the Mexicans ultimately won (it was the French, you know...) Benito Juarez took over the country and eliminated racial preference. People were encouraged to inter-marry and most did, except for the richest (Spanish or criollos) and the poorest, the Indians. The country floundered along until about 1910.
Back in 1846, the Maya, using their British muskets, rebelled. This touched off a civil war, the Caste War, sputtered on from 1846 to 1910 when the Mexican army introduced the Maya to the tactical advantages of the Maxim gun. And peace came to southern Mexico, just in time for the next civil war...
About the time the Caste War ended the Mexican Revolution took place. This resulted in a Marxist constitution, suppression of foreign trade and investment, nationalization of key infrastructure and resources, suppression of religion, a one party state and a kind of weird radical interracialism combined with extreme xenophobia. This floundered along until the 1980s, by which time it had become apparent that the whole socialism thing just was not working out. The result was El Comercio Libre, AKA NAFTA. NAFTA worked great for the rich and the working class but totally screwed the Mexican middle class. If you were a small businessman in Mexico you found yourself competing with gigantic American companies who could come in, build a factory and manufacture your product for a fraction of the price that you could make it for. Along with NAFTA the Bush administration, followed by Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama, drastically weakened border enforcement drawing a flood of uneducated Mexican peasants to the US, where they could be hired for cheap and where they couldn't complain about wages or working conditions for fear of deportation. And of course the people who really made out from weaker border enforcement were the drug and human traffickers, who make their fortunes tax free and use their wealth to further corrupt the Mexican political process while spreading carnage to innocent Mexicans who just want to make a decent living in their own country.
So yes, the problem is... Mexicans.
Perhaps in the Mexican people would put just half the energy into fixing their country that they do into destroying ours then maybe someday Mexico will be a place Mexicans don’t have to run away from.
I’m sorry but I’ve worked in construction along side Mexicans and found them to obnoxious, lazy, deceitful and everyone of them a thief. They hate us and I hate them. They arrogant beggars.
That is, in effect, a declaration of war.
I tried to post there a couple times they can smell a conservative before you even log in !
Evidently this jerk has forgotten the “Halls of Montezuma...”
Culture matters.
...and Mexico, by exporting it's disaffected population, gets to postpone a revolutionary situation and keep it's oligarchs in power.
I’m sorry but I’ve worked in construction along side Mexicans and found them to obnoxious, lazy, deceitful and everyone of them a thief. They hate us and I hate them. They arrogant beggars
Hear, hear.
Sigh. Time to invade Mexico. Clean it up. Give it back. Along with a bill for services rendered. Payable on the installment plan because we remember Wiemar.
Makes perfect sense when you realize they see the US as their own, unfairly occupied, Aztlan that they are having to take back by steady invasion.
What is so pathetic is that too much of the US hasn’t realized the same and has actually encouraged it.
Makes perfect sense when you realize they see the US as their own, unfairly occupied, Aztlan that they are having to take back by steady invasion.
What is so pathetic is that too much of the US hasn’t realized the same and has actually encouraged it.
VDH is the only exception I make when it comes to NR.
L
When people vote, they get the government they deserve, by and large.
The political mindset of Latin Americans explains their governments and what they, becoming voters here, will do to our government as well.
That is because successful democracies are dependent not just on political mechanisms, but on the culture of the people.
I’d suggest you think again about those who come here illegally for not just the pay you see them getting, but all the government benefits they wrongly accrue as well.
“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.”
A 25% tax on that sounds just about right.
L
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