CBP chief sees stagnant Mexican economy driving migrants to US

Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said Tuesday that he believes Mexico’s stagnant economy could be pushing migrants north to the United States in search of work.

The number of Mexicans apprehended on the southern border increased 10.6 percent in January from the previous month, to 16,116. Mexican nationals represented about 61 percent of apprehended migrants last month, and the majority were single adults.

The January figures mark a significant increase from the percentage of Mexican migrants last year. When border apprehensions hit a 13-year high in May, the majority of migrants were from Northern Triangle countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

“Just like we had pull-push factors from the Northern Triangle countries, those same push-pull factors exist from Mexico, so they’re the same,” Morgan told reporters at a press conference.

“Not everyone trying to illegally enter the United States is good. Not everyone trying to enter the United States is vulnerable,” Morgan said. “In fact, there are some very dangerous people trying to enter this country every single day.”

I’m an American Hispanic-I’m white/Caucasian, of mostly European ancestry, like other Hispanics-there are some Black Hispanics-mostly from the Caribbean and parts of South America-but nearly all of us, Black or White have some Native American DNA. There are Asian Hispanics from the Philippines, etc, too...

Totalitarians don’t care what color/race/ethnic group you are-they just want to create chaos that leads to a new and improved USSR style world with them as the ruling class...

Muslims-of any race/color-have been a deadly enemy of people in Europe for 900 centuries or so-especially the Spanish-people in Europe need to read their history again and figure that out...

Most Americans don't know much about the recent (esp. the last 100 years) history of Mexico. It is much too checkered to be called a "Long history of Euro style oligarchy and the top down version of Catholicism that reigns over them."

History is never a neat narrative, but Mexican history seems (to my beginner-mind) to be awfully complex. For instance, although the Church was very powerful in the Mexican colonial era, its wealth, influence and status eroded fairly early, starting in the Bourbon era (mid-1700's).

After bumpy ups and downs, by the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican liberals fully separated Church and State and undermined the political and economic role of the Church.

In the midst of the left-wing Mexican Revolution (1910-20) the revolutionary Constitution of 1917 sparked the Constitutionalists' expulsion of thousands of priests, physical attacks on churches, chapels and shrines, with altars and statues smashed, churches seized to be used as storehouses and stables. (And what else was going on in 1917, hey? Think think think...)

The Mexican government actively attempted to eliminate the Catholic Church's legal existence in Mexico. The anti-Catholic extremism ---including the seizure and nationalization of all Catholic schools, hospitals and properties,the enforcement of mandatory attendance in government schools teaching a Marxist curriculum, the banning of any religious observance outside of Church buildings, and the stripping of the clergy of both the right to vote and the right to even comment on public affairs ---continued on and off for decades.

According to Wikipedia (LINK) there were 4,500 priests in Mexico before the rebellion, but by 1934 there were only 334 --- to serve fifteen million people. The rest had been eliminated by emigration, expulsion and assassination.

After that, the Mexican government backed away from its enforcement of many of the anticlerical articles of the constitution--- which nevertheless remained on the books. It varies regionally, but in some areas Mexico remained "officially" as stridently secularist as --- say --- France.

So to say that Mexican progress has been stymied by the top-down power of the Catholic Church is ---I think --- dubious from a historic point of view.

But then, why has this resource-rich and people-rich nation been so crippled from a point of view of healthy economic development?

I do think the USA has a big advantage of having a stable Constitutional basis, and no war on our shores for the past 150 years.

I also think Mexico's development has been skewed with international trade relationships which resulted in billionaires at the top and squalor at the bottom. Think NAFTA.

In that context, it'll be interesting to see how Mexico does since Trump scuttled NAFTA and got USMCA treaty instead. I am ignorant about the economic details, but I think it could help Mexico with the overhauling of their economy.

I hope! We'll see!

I think the problems with the Priests in Mexico in this century were created by the ones 150 and 200 and even 300 years ago in Mexico.
There was a period where the Church was a participating member of the government, and was the largest landowner in Mexico. It deeply supported Monarchs and regular people were always abused.
So the way I see it, was that in the Mexican revolution way too many people saw the church as a handmaiden to the kinds of governments they wanted gone. They wanted the church to have no say in the government, but weren’t pushing for an atheist nation. The church saw the anticlerical laws as worthy of launching a war.

The anticlerical laws were honorable in their goal, but went way too far. The goal was to not have government dominated by the church. But instead of American style methods, they passed laws about priests not wearing garb in public, having to register, not being allowed to work in campaigns, etc.

But all the Calles law and similar attitudes were not in a vacuum. They were based upon che church being an oppressor there for hundreds of years before.

An aside is that I think they went astray in adopting too many Mexican indian and pagan ideas. That shortcut cannot have helped in the long run. We see the same thing today. Just last week a cathedral was blocked off from the public so Guzman’s daughter the Cartel princess could have a wedding there. The Church allowed armed gunmen to surround the blood money wedding. Those are the compromises that hurt their reputation there. Similar to letting Democrat politicians take communion despite being enthusiastic abortionists.

It’s really kind of sad, the Conquistadors did a service to humanity by wiping out the Aztec savages. And the first priests included some utterly amazing servants of God. Their bravery and dedication is well documented and legend. But they were followed by some greedy and despotic clerics. The Priest who established the missions in California is a shining example.

The Cristero war cannot be seen as something like “in 1926 for reasons nobody understands, severe laws were passed against the Church”. That dishonest viewpoint is often pushed.

Mexico is a rough place to understand. But to understand why Mexico is so backwards today, the role of the Church from say roughly the mid 1600s to the mid 1800s cannot be ignored.

And just to be clear this isn’t just anti-Catholic. Catholicism in America has been fine as far as I know. But in Mexico it had serious problems and as I observe anywhere they literally become the temporal government. But in America, it’s been an ally and an asset.

I guess we all have our warts. Southern Baptists were formed when they disagreed and thought a preacher should be able to own slaves. Mormons, where to begin? The Episcopalians are basically the Church of England...founded in divorce and head chopping. Lots of weird out there.

BTW, if you haven’t seen it, watch “The Fugitive” with Henry Fonda from 1947. It’s a John Ford film about a Priest on the Run in Mexico during the anti-clerical era. They start with a disclaimer saying it isn’t really in Mexico...but that’s exactly what it is. You’ll enjoy that. And it truly is one of the best films you’ll ever see.

Have a good one.

Recognizing the limits of my knowledge in this area, I'll still venture that one of the big problems with the Catholic Church in Mexico was the lack of indigenous clergy, which fed into the racial-cultural divide where the clergy were always white/Spanish, the laity mestizo or "Puro indio."

Paradoxically, this came about because of the Catholic Church (or leading factions, in any case) trying to strictly cordon off Indian and pagan attitudes and practices.

The very first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, started off as an enthusiastic promoter of Indian rights and evangelization, and hoped to quickly train and develop indigenous clergy. For this purpose he founded the first College in the Americas, the Colegio de Santa Cruz, to be a hub for translators, interpreters, and a rather sophisticated approach to intercultural encounter.

That was 1536. By 1555 they called off the whole native-ordination project, because their seminarians, drawn from the Aztec elite and intellectually very gifted, just never absorbed underlying principles which educated Spaniards like Zumarraga took for granted. Not just spiritual and moral principles. Even rules of logic (like the Law of Non-Contradiction!)

For instance, the Nahuatl language had almost no words for right/wrong, good/evil, vice/virtue, and so forth. Their culture/civilization did not conceive of morality per se. They saw their "moral" obligation to be, not to "do good and avoid evil", or to strive for the Truth, but to discover and carry out their personal destiny.

And they recognized no bright line between truth/falsehood. A drug-kindled hallucination while on a vision-quest, or a compelling fable set to compelling music --- they were great musicians --- was as good as (or better than) truth to them.

So evangelization very difficult because the cultures were so incompatible.

That failure behind them, others took the opposite approach: winking at a certain amount of syncretism in hopes of getting the native Mexicans to accept the Biblical God their "principal" god: one among many, but assueredly, the top one, the Boss God!

It's a conflict that's by no means over. That's part of what the very disturbing Pachamama controversy --- seen in its widest implications--- is all about.

"The past isn't dead: it isn't even past."

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