Posted on 06/18/2007 8:52:30 AM PDT by BornInASmallTown
When I reported from Mexico last year during the record-setting immigrant marches here in the United States, I conducted my own unscientific poll on the immigration issue among people I met. "What should the United States do about illegal immigration?" I asked everyone from street vendors to academics at the venerable National Autonomous University of Mexico. Each time, the respondent would tick off a long list without missing a beat, starting with a flood of vitriol against the proposed wall and the placement of the U.S. National Guard at the border.
Then I would ask: "What should Mexico do about illegal immigration?" In every case, there was a pause, followed by the same answer: "It's very complicated."
Here's what Mexico has done about illegal immigration: Provided 3-to-1 matching funds for every dollar of remittance money sent home by immigrants in the United States for public works projects. Remittances, at an estimated $20 billion a year, are the country's second-highest source of income.
Here's what else Mexico has done: Created a federal bureaucracy called Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior and state-level agencies that provide services to Mexican nationals living abroad - after they're driven out by a lack of viable employment and government help at home. That our U.S. leaders continue to try to solve a two-sided problem without enlisting the other side is baffling.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
They supplied the 12 million pieces for the puzzle?
ping
bump
Warns against permanent foreign alliances.
“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world...”
George Washington’s
Farewell Address
That was too easy wasn’t it?!
For Freepers who like to think — you’ll enjoy reading the entire article. It provides scope and insight into the changes that are about to befall us.
Mexicans have just told us exactly what to do to keep them from invading. National Guard at the border and an effective double wall fence. A very good start, other measures are also neeeded
I can’t believe I got it in first.
Bump for later.
“Racism is “as American as apple pie,” says Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. “
And Princeton University is a much a piece of left-wing political offal as any other ivy league school in the U.S., and so are its racist professors like this one.
She gets in her dig about the US being racist, and believes that we should invest another $2 billion creating jobs in Mexico.
So, clearly, she doesn’t get it. We admit a million legal immigrants per year into the US, a million, and of those Mexicans have the highest quota of any country on earth. So to claim that the US is racist is quite simply lame, and contributes nothing to understanding.
Mexico does clearly have a problem, however. Between legal and illegal emigrants, she loses three quarters of a million people every year to the US because of her inability to offer gainful employment. Compare that to the fact that we take in a million and a half, between legal and illegals, and we still have the lowest unemployment rate in the world. Since Mexico is a major oil producer, and an industrial power in its own right, what is its problem?
Its problem is not something an extra $2 billion from the US is going to solve. Its problems are at once very complicated and very simple. Prosperity requires certain prerequisites: Rule of law. Clear property rights. People have to be safe in their person. Courts have to be honest and transparent.
Mexico suffers in all of those areas. The result is wave after wave of its people leaving, preferring the bottom rung in America to the uncertainty and hopelessness of what they left behind. The US is imperfect, but overall even an illegal finds treatment that is relatively fair, cops who are relatively honest and humane, work that is relatively dignified for pay that is, again, relatively fair.
There is nothing that prevents Mexico from living up to the same level of relative fairness, other than the fact that it doesn’t, and doesn’t see the need to do so. The classic liberalism at the root of the American system is a rarity in this world, everyone sees the benefit of its imperfect application here, but no one wants to try it in their own country. Suggest it and you’ll get the same answer again and again; all that is fine for a rich country, but it would never work in a poor one like ours, they say, and so the cycle continues generation after generation.
It’s very interesting. One thing that I have frequently tried to point out is that most Mexicans actually do not want to stay in the US - they want to earn enough here to go back home, buy a house in their village and open a little store or start some other kind of business. They like Mexico, but they can’t afford to live there.
The Mexican economy should be booming, but Mexico has 70 years of regarding itself as a socialist state, which always means a state that eventually turns into a paralyzed, stagnant oligarchy. Things are just fine for the rich Mexicans, but the bureaucratically controlled economy has led to no progress in legitimate businesses, massive corruption, and a thriving criminal economy with all the violence and instability that implies.
Fox was horrible, but Calderon does seem to be attempting to make some changes. However, it’s going to take a long time for them to happen and produce any effect. Some kind of joint US-Mexican project might help, but I honestly don’t see any possibility of it.
AND last, but not least, the people have to want those things and vote for them. That's not what they want. At least half of them want things taken from the producers and given to the have-nots because the Communists have brainwashed them into believing that the producers have stolen their stuff, including the southwestern portion of the U.S.
None of the prerequisites are going to happen in Mexico with or without $ and aid from the U.S., and by opening our borders and legalizing anybody who wants to come here (Mexicans as well as the downtrodden from all over the world), we're going to become N. Mexico, or a 3rd world entity just like them.
Nice to see somebody actually mentioning reform in Mexico, but it looks like her solution is to throw more money at the crooked political system instead of reforming it.
But John McCain says illegals will just get shovels and dig under any fence.
Answer: first with a question, where's the documentation for that "300 percent matching funds?"
Second part, the reason why is because the corrupt, criminal ruling class of Mexico will steal the money.
Mexico's birth rate has plummeted and its population begins to age
Uh oh! Add another trillion or two to our social security debt.
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