"C" is for "Chutzpah". Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Katrina hurricane disaster, is shown on TV today daring to grade other people's performance and giving himself a "C". I'd suggest Brown deserves a "K", as in "Katrina".
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Southern Sunbelt. AOL today hilites on its welcome screen a story headlined, "Why Mexico Is the New Florida: Coolest Spots Offer Low Costs and Fewer Crowds". Altho that article deals with tourism, it should make people think about what might have been had the "All-Mexico Movement" prevailed after the Mexican War of 1846-48.
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That Expansionist movement advocated that the entire territory of Mexico be taken by the United States after the defeat of Mexico, and eventually be brought into the Union as several states. It failed not just because there was a large population of mixed race that the white ruling class of the United States had qualms about giving representation in Congress and votes for President, but, even more importantly, the Nation was then fiercely divided over the issue of slavery and the annexation of all of Mexico would have complicated the matter.
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Mexico adjoined the slave states, but was hostile to slavery. Facing the triumph of abolitionism within a few decades at most if the boundaries between slave states and free remained the same, slavers wanted to be 'free' to extend slavery into any conquered territory that adjoined slave states. The rest of the Nation refused, but passed the Wilmot Proviso barring such extension. That meant that any new states to be created from Mexico would join the forces of abolition, so slave states opposed annexing anything but the relatively empty northern third of Mexico (not counting Texas, which had already been annexed, as a slave state), which they could then populate, by westward migration, with pro-slavery settlers.
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Oddly, powerful forces in the North also opposed annexation, for different reasons. Some Northerners had reservations about giving millions of Indians and mestizos the vote. Others had moral objections to imposing American civilization by force. They felt that Mexicans had the right to be independent and govern themselves without outside impositions.
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So the U.S. rejected annexation of populous southern Mexico for reasons of racism, slavery, and naivete. Mexico went on to "enjoy" the fruits of democracy by suffering dictatorship, a bloody civil war that killed a million people (almost twice the toll of ours, against a population half ours, 15 million for Mexico in 1910 as against 31 million for the U.S. in 1860), then decades of one-party rule.
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The northern half of Mexico (including Texas) annexed to the U.S. became prosperous Sunbelt states, with a total population today of about 75 million. The southern half, Mexico today, has a population of 106 million, most of them hideously poor by American standards — which is the largest part of why millions want out of Mexico proper and into former-Mexico and other parts of the United States. Escaping a culture of inequality and social immobility is the other big reason for mass emigration.
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Mexico's misery didn't have to happen.
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Had all of Mexico been annexed, the population of Mexico today might be in the range of 80 million, and the standard of living three or four times as high. (Mexican per capita income is at best about $10,000; U.S., about $40,000. Per capita income is a statistical measure that divides gross national income by the number of people in a country. It does not mean that the typical person makes that much.)
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Instead of being a wretched, corrupt society from which millions of people try desperately to flee, Mexico could instead be a group of prosperous Sunbelt states where retirees from snow country could flock to enjoy their golden years. But you don't see much migration from the United States to independent Mexico, do you?
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It's not too late to bring Mexico into the Union. Slavery is gone, so that shouldn't affect votes in the U.S. Congress. Racism is much attenuated. Americans who are linguistically insecure would worry about the future of English in admitting 106 million speakers of Spanish, but there would still be three times as many speakers of English, we are absorbing more words from Spanish every year, and long-term Latino residents do learn English. Their children often abandon Spanish. Our economies are now deeply interdependent, and there are already calls for relaxation of immigration controls at least for temporary workers. The European Union has full freedom of movement within its economic zone; NAFTA does not. Free movement has not ravaged Europe. It wouldn't ravage us.
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Some of the Founders of the United States envisioned a Hemispheric federal union from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego. That's a vision to conjure with, and annexing Mexico would be a big step in that direction.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,272.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:47 PM