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the majority of the wealth is in the north no matter where you go

I read a facinating book years ago on global climate and it's effect on civilization. It bascially said that because the northern' climate was cooler and more energizing, it produced cultures that were more productive. Seems to make sense to me. The heat makes me lazy.

Some have taken it further out and said that because of what you mentioned, agriculture was able to truly come into being in the north and take hold, which freed up a lot of people to concentrate on other things. Basically, they could change from a "spend every waking moment gathering food and shelter materials" society to a "concentrate on building more permanent settlements around agriculture, freeing up other people to eventually work on refining various things leading to technological advances" society. Not to say that it couldn't happen in the south - with Egypt and the Mayan/Inca civilizations being some of the exceptions.

Either way, we have a serious problem - a lot of southern areas that either can't feed themselves for one reason or another (take some places in Africa were they did a piss-poor job of farming and helped ruin their land, and/or had to rely on outside help, which could be controlled by one warlord or another), or their economic situations (and governments) are in the dumps (i.e. the problem the US faces with Mexico).

The US has faced this in the past - when Europe had problems, whether it's the Irish Potato famine or whatever, the US was their outlet. When the US had problems in the East, opening up the West was their outlet.

Now we are seeing problems in Mexico and central and South America, and the US has become the outlet. I don't foresee those problems going away, and even if we throw up a serious wall, illegals will still make their way in one way or the other. I'm not advocating the annexation of Mexico, but at some point when 50+% of their citizens are here, then we might have a legal right to do so ;-)