That's essentially along the lines of an answer that will offer long term solutions. But simply annexing the area leaves some other matters that we would need to address. We would need a quick and dramatic increase in US Marshals to help bring law and order to this area. The Mexican states would have to adopt constitutions that adhere to our federal constitution, and our existing Congress would have to approve each of these. Programs like Social Security would have to be altered so the new citizens would pay according to established law, but benefits are slowly integrated over a period of 25 years or more. This must be so we do not repeat the problems encountered when East and West Germany were reunited.
There would be other benefits too. Mexican fugitives from justice would suddenly find themselves unable to elude justice by simply walking across a border. The southern border we would have to defend would shrink to barely half our present southern border, and with no major southern cities outside our jurisdiction. We had ample time to teach many of the illegal immigrants our American way of life, and they would be eager to return home and help instill these ways in their communities. Our nation would be much less dependant on oil from the Middle East. Our economy would expand beyond anything we've ever dreamed. We would uncover the truths of which of our citizens have willingly participated with the corrupt Mexican elite in such treasonous ways that have wrought great ill upon our society. Family issues like abortion and marriage would be decided with a Congressional determination that no court could overturn. We would crush the drug cartels. NAFTA and more recent proposed accords would become non-existent.
I don't believe our Manifest Destiny ended at the Pacific shores. I don't know that we are a people of such fortitude that brought expansion when Manifest Destiny was embraced in the youth of our nation.
Interesting. I have to get offline for awhile. I'll be back with questions later.
I don't think we have the high calibur (honest) people in govt. that we'd need, to pull this off, so that the American taxpayer doesn't lose out more than they are, now.
"But simply annexing the area leaves some other matters that we would need to address."
Ever read Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture," "Migrations and Culture," and "Conquests and Culture?"
One thing Mexico doesn't have, and this could make your plan unworkable, is what Sowell calls "human capital."
I'm not talking only about educational standards, but about worldview.
As Michener points out, not just Mexico, but every former Spanish colony suffers from political corruption. This is a way of life introduced because the Spanish colonial governors were corrupt. Even the Philippines, which had a century of American supervision and a half century of "democracy," still practices corruption as a way of life.
For them, corruption is a part of the nature of things, not an evil to be eradicated. To say that government is corrupt is like saying that the sky is blue or water is wet. That's the way things are and ever shall be, in saecula saeculorum.
The rejection of corruption in government as an absolute moral evil was one of the things that were so special about the American Revolution, and part of our legacy from George Washington. Mexico has never had that. Ever.
I doubt if you could find two people in all of Mexico who both (a) are capable of holding a high-level government position, and (b) would not practice corruption in office.
Three of the things that you absolutely must have to build an America-like state are:
Freedom (which would be possible for Mexico);
Private property rights (ditto); and
Government of laws and not men (which means that corruption must be minimized as it only can be when there is a broad consensus that it is anathema).
That last one is a deal-killer, I think.
To bring Mexico into the United States, the high government officials in the former Mexican areas would have to be Mexicans. The Mexican people would not accept the wholesale import of gringos to rule them, nor puppet governments with gringos pulling the strings.
That means that government in those areas would be corrupt to a degree that would make Tammany Hall look like a nunnery. That, in turn, means that instead of things getting better in the former Mexican areas, things would get worse in the original United States.
In addition, the new states would have to have representation in the legislature along the same lines as the original states. That would mean an influx of congenitally corrupt third-worlders into congress and the senate.
A tyrant with absolute power *might* be able to pull it off, but it would require thousands or tens of thousands of executions, the suppression of the leftist press and the permanent internment of large numbers of leftists under conditions we would consider sub-par, and the machine-gunning of demonstrators in the streets.