No kidding.
drugs and illegal immigration...are symptoms, not diseases. The disease itself, the cause of these visible effects, is poverty...
He needs to read Hernando de Soto. You can't understand the causes of poverty if you don't understand the causes of wealth. The key to a prosperous society is simple, if difficult to give birth to.
It requires rule of law, first and foremost.
It requires individual freedom, so that men are free to do what they know to do, to make decisions as they themselves know to make them.
It requires legal clarity, so that all sides of a dispute know what the legal ramifications are.
It requires a transparent and honest court system, so that everyone rich and poor alike can accumulate the fruit of their labor and see their assets protected. Land needs to be protected with legal titles, and those titles need to be respected. This is one of the most important issues; in much of latin america the poor do not have title to their land, and can not accumulate wealth because of it.
A populist dictator who seizes and redistributes wealth is the worst thing that can happen, because the only way to be protect your assets in such a system is to have friends in high places, which completely undoes rule of law and all the protections that are necessary for anyone to accumulate wealth. Populism causes oligarchy, it guarantees it. Every time. Populism makes oligarchy necessary.
This writer doesn't know that, so he doesn't understand his own history, how generation after generation, revolution after revolution, they always find themselves right back at square one. Their solutions to the problem are the cause of the problem.
There is a man who is RICHER than Bill Gates living in Mexico. The money is there. It isn’t America’s fault or responsibility.
You've just described the character of the United States, as bequeathed to us by Great Britain.
This is the reason why multiculturalism and unfetterred, non-assimilating immigration is so destructive to prosperity. That prosperity did not pop out of thin air. Is is the direct result of a highly successful American Culture. Replace that culture with a corrupt third world culture, and you replace prosperity with squalor.
Then everybody loses.