Turning the Tide?

by Peter Saint-Andre

2006-06-04

Georgie Anne Geyer writes:

Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures....

But there are new voices of change, of reason, of self-awareness in Mexico, in place of the hoary anti-gringo rants: the beginnings of a transformation of the debate....

The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined "Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity." It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: "For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure"....

Surely the fact that America has awakened to the insult of its "neighbor" cynically exporting its problems, while doing nada at home, can only help Mexico and jar it to some modern sense. Ironically, the debate and the anger in the U.S. about this mammoth illegal immigration has already helped Mexico to begin to shed its dependency on America -- and to turn its energies toward its own real predators, all home-grown.

More about the corruption of the Mexican oligopoly here and here. Only through real, Anglosphere-like reform and resultant economic growth in Mexico will the immigration problem start to solve itself. (Though personally I think American could use some reform of its own, most particularly in this context reform of the horrendous Immigration and Naturalization Service.)


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