So in other words, the Pastor bonehead wants us to subsidize Mexico's crummy economy, reducing the incentive for their government and people to improve it themselves. Is that what he/it is saying?
These are the final words of his book
http://bookstore.iie.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=331
Toward A North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New
by Robert A. Pastor
August 2001 • 224 pp. ISBN paper 0-88132-328-4 • $28.00
http://www.iie.com/publications/chapters_preview/331/8iie3284.pdf
Chapter 8. From A North American to an American Community: The 21st Century of Integration
(snip)
US President Bush has a unique opportunity to structure a relationship that will have a profound effect not just on Canada and Mexico but also on the United States. It will require resources, new organizations, difficult negotiations, and most of all, a new perspective on the region. A commentator for the Toronto Star posed the issue concisely: ‘‘So the challenge is to create a North American Community whose vision goes far beyond trade and investment but without sacrificing cultural identity and core national institutions and values.’’19
The North American Community has much to learn from the European Union—about both what it should adapt and what it should avoid. But the New World does not want to replicate the bureaucracy of the Old or the many instruments the Union uses to reduce disparities between rich and poor countries. What distinguishes the North American approach from the European is the respect for the market. This market orientation has permitted North American efficiencies and the economies of scale that have helped fuel the region’s restructuring and development. And indeed, the European Union is trying to replicate the US market’s policies on labor flexibility and uniform standards.20
What Canada, Mexico, and the United States need is a North American perspective and a few lean organizations that can help coordinate the three countries’ multiple levels of governance and can accelerate integration without harming laggard regions. One option is to wait and let the market do its work, as the US South did for nearly 100 years. Or one can hasten the process by making targeted investments in infrastructure and education. What North America could learn most of all from the European Union is commitment. From its 1999 budget of $120 billion, the Union used about a third—$40 billion—for Structural and Cohesion Funds to reduce the disparities between rich and poor countries. Europe’s gross product is smaller than North America’s, and yet the Union spends about six times more on aid for its poor members as the United States spends on assisting its poor states. And the Union has programmed that annual aid to grow to about $70 billion by 2006.
If Canada and the United States contributed just 10 percent of what the European Union spends on aid, and if Mexico invested it wisely in infrastructure and education, Mexico could start to grow at a rate twice that of its northern neighbors. The psychology of North America would change quickly, and the problems of immigration, corruption, and drugs would look different. North America would have found the magic formula to lift developing countries to the industrial world, and that would be the 21st-century equivalent of the shot heard round the world.
It seems to me like they are looking for the US, and Canada, to be their savior, to pour billions more dollars into Mexico and to tie us together through various dependencies 'til kingdom come. With billions for investments in new infrastructure, combined with increasing wages (at the expense of declining US wages), Mexico can flourish. As Pastor said, "North America would have found the magic formula to lift developing countries to the industrial world."
It's Utopia, doncha know?