Mexico Looking to Keep an Open US Border

By JJ Gouin @Adobe Stock

America’s Narco Neighbor: No Secure Border

In myriad ways, Mexico understands that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and the emigration of millions of its own citizens to America, are entirely in Mexico’s own interests. In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson explains why Mexico wants to see the continuation of the “Biden-Harris-Mayorkas appeasement”

Donald Trump’s recent conversation with Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum about the millions who have crossed through Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally, went well, according to Trump. It was reported that both agreed to secure the border.

Mexico’s long-standing de facto Mexican policy has been to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border. Shortly after their talk, however, Sheinbaum rejected that she had been accommodating.

From President Sheinbaum:

I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.

Mexico Doesn’t Want a Secure Border

And of course, she’s right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, argues VDH.  It is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What Is Going On 

Over the last half-century, Mexico has gradually, even insidiously, developed both a one-sided, asymmetrical relationship with the U.S. based on professed mutual benefit and yet sought to leverage America by claiming it is supposedly guilty for two centuries of oppressive treatment.

U.S.-Mexico’s Asymmetrical Bond

The Mexican government has traditionally seen the U.S. as an endlessly wealthy country, liberally governed, and willing to listen to Mexico’s grievances of the sort that are common in asymmetrical partnerships, continues VDH.

Former President Obrador, while in office, often said strange things. Two of the most pugnacious were his high-five boast that some 40 million of his own citizens had fled Mexico to cross the border:

“Just imagine. There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.” (Obrador never explained why his own citizens would willingly flee their own country to a nation habitually caricatured in the Mexican press as racist and exploitive.)

• Obrador also periodically delighted in interfering in US elections by urging Mexican expatriates in the U.S. to vote against all Republicans, presumably because they seemed at times to threaten to kill the Mexican golden goose of illegal immigration.

• Obrador urged American Hispanics to never vote for Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign— an irony given Mexico’s chronic complaint of Yanqui interference in Latin American politics.

• Obrador believed, as many presidents before him no doubt concurred, that the 40 million expatriates and Mexican-American children,if they were distant from Mexico long enough, would romanticize the country, and so, like most immigrants, become a powerful lobbying force on Mexico’s behalf.

Mexico Assists China

China avoids tariffs on its exports to the U.S. by assembling its products in NAFTA and tariff-free Mexico. The Chinese seek both to profit from its cartel ties and to kill Americans. In the bargain, American security is undermined. As VDH notes, the macabre gambit is likely seen as the Chinese version of an updated Opium War payback, with the twist that the former addicts are now the suppliers.

In an equally sick way, the cartels infuse into the Mexican trickle-down economy, albeit in nefarious and criminal ways, some $30 billion in additional U.S. dollars from Americans addicted to imported Mexican-made drugs tailored for the U.S. market.

The presidents of Mexico usually say little about this second source of billions in U.S. foreign exchange or claim American addicts, not Mexican suppliers, explain the growing death and destruction on both sides of the border.

The resulting huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, violence financial costs of supporting millions is seen by America as not to her advantage. As VDH notes, it was a meaningful factor in Trump’s recent victory.

That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.