Mexico to Act on Illegal Immigration — from Central America. Mexico, the source of millions of illegal immigrants to the United States, has its own illegal immigration problem, from Central America. Now, a proposed reform in its immigration laws embraces a guest-worker program for Central Americans, like that proposed by the Bush Administration for Mexicans. At least that's what I heard on one of the Spanish-language network newscasts this evening, probably Univisión.* When I tried to get more info from the Internet, I did not see the story on either Univisión's or Telemundo's website. (Actually, if you try to go to www.telemundo.com, you are redirected to Yahoo Telemundo. Telemundo is now a subsidiary of NBC and partner of Yahoo.)
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Mexico's 750-mile border with Guatemala (mainly) and Belize is a problem area. Even poorer people than Mexicans, from Central America (not just Guatemala and Belize, but points south as well) look for work in Mexico, and seek to pass thru Mexico to get to the United States. Drug traffic also passes thru Mexico's porous southern border, and some of the same problems of "coyotes" (people smugglers) and common criminals preying upon migrants mark Mexico's southern border as mark our southern border. The main advantage Mexico enjoys over the U.S. in regard to controlling illegal immigration is the length (or shortness) of its southern border, only 600 miles with Guatemala, which is where most of the problems arise, and another 150 with Belize (the former British Honduras), not the 2,000 miles we have with Mexico.
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If the U.S. annexed Mexico as perhaps ten States of the Union, our southern border would be 750 miles long, not 2,000. If we annexed Central America as well, as another six states, our southern border would be only about 140 miles. And the economic development and social change that statehood brings would keep by far most of the people of those areas where they now live and would prefer to live. The rest of the Nation would get mainly "the best and the britest", the people who want to fly high in their chosen profession, in top cities like New York, Chicago, and L.A. These wouldn't be the gardeners and dishwashers that current migration brings, but the professionals, models, artists, and creative people who make the melting pot of our great cities so dynamic and productive. That kind of migration would serve us all. The migration we now have serves no one really well.
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Mexico is apparently going to try its own guest-worker (bracero) program for Central Americans, in hopes of regulating the flow to benefit rather than subvert the Mexican economy, just as a bracero program here would match employers to temporary workers and provide an orderly means by which people whose only interest in this country is money, to make that money during a limited period only, and then go home. Mexico wants its illegals to go home too.
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Mexico's present policy on its southern border not only hasn't worked but has also outraged human-rights observers. Read, for instance, these two paragraphs from last month by Liam Weston, a columnist for the Sacramento Union newspaper:

Mexico ... is not so generous when its national sovereignty is being violated. Since 1974, anyone found entering Mexico illegally is subject to two years of incarceration, if they are lucky. For years Mexican troops on Mexico’s southern border have used land mines and assault rifles to deter Central American immigrants from entering Mexico. Anyone trying to cross Mexico’s southern border illegally can be killed with little or no notice to the media.

Escaping the troops still does not mean that immigrants without documentation are out of trouble once inside Mexico. In the mid-80’s, a Nicaraguan friend’s younger sister successfully penetrated Mexico’s southern border by bribing guards. However, she was later caught in northern Mexico without appropriate paperwork. The 17-year old recounted her nightmare of being dragged off a public bus and repeatedly raped in a guard shack. She dared not report the crime to other officials since her illegal status in Mexico could have earned her two years in a Mexican jail.

If true, this incident helps to explain why more than twice as many people in an online poll at Yahoo Telemundo** find corruption a greater problem for Latin America than poverty.
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That is a grossly underappreciated "push" factor in migration out of Latin America to the United States. Latin America is horrible, especially to the poor, and when people talk about "opportunity" as a "pull" factor in migration to the United States, they are really talking about more than the opportunity to make a few bucks. The opportunity to be treated like a human being and pursue one's own life by one's own lites is a large part of what drives people to take great pains, spend a lot of money, and brave terrible hardships and dangers to get out of Latin America and into the United States. Plainly, if we want to reduce illegal immigration from Latin America, we should be doing everything in our considerable power to democratize that region socioeconomiocally and break down the barriers to social mobility across all-too-rigid class boundaries in the bulk of this Hemisphere.
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I didn't have the time or patience today to read thru the entire 15-page discussion of Mexico's immigration problem that I found on the University of Idaho website. This is, after all, not news to me. I've known about it for some time. But I did note these introductory remarks, which show that the author, Melinda S. Oja, appreciates some of the factors impelling migration from Latin America to the U.S.

Immigration is not a new phenomenon. Long before small-scale societies emerged, man roamed the earth, primarily in search of food. The principle reason that migration is noticed today is the establishment of organized states with defined borders. * * *

Social, political, and economic factors called “push factors” influence potential migrants when making the decision to leave their host country. Push factors like of underdevelopment, poverty, corruption, exploitation, low wages, the lack of land and jobs, income disparities, or political strife are major causes of international outward migration[footnote omitted]. It can also be caused by overcrowding because of high population density, as in the case of El Salvador[footnote omitted]. The lure of higher wages, possible employment, higher standards of living, cultural support networks, and freedom from political violence are examples of factors that “pull” a potential migrant towards another country. Though many upper class members of developing societies migrate as well, the dramatic push/pull factors of international migration are most influential on members of the poor sectors of society who have less to lose by migrating[footnote omitted]

Still, Ms. Oja doesn't quite "get it". The poor leave Latin America because Latin America is grossly unfair, and no matter how talented they might be, Latin America's poor cannot rise as high as their talents would take them in a fair society.
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Conversely, the reason the upper classes of Latin nations tend to stay put is that they are living high on the hog at the expense of the downtrodden whom their class 'keeps in its place'. The only social mobility the upper classes see is downward mobility if they let the poor rise, and they certainly don't want that. They have a static view of the economic pie: there's only so much pie to go around, and if the poor get a bigger slice, the rich get a smaller slice, so small that they can't live well, or might even starve. But that's not the way economic opportunity in a free society works.
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When you give everybody the chance to rise according to their abilities, you free energies that create new products, inventions, services; and you unleash new purchasing power that creates new wealth for everyone.
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The rich in most countries, not just Third World countries, have a seesaw or teetertotter view of social mobility: if some people rise, others must fall. But society is not a teetertotter. There is plenty of room at the middle and top, and general prosperity and personal freedom make life better for everyone, even those who now jealously guard their privileged turf against intruders.
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I can thus readily agree with the general thrust of Ms. Oja's conclusion:

It is not enough to address the symptoms of international migration. Though politicians may feel that all they need to offer is short-term solutions to a long standing problem, the only way to achieve a genuine reduction in the number of illegal migrants that migrate through Central America and Mexico is to diminish the factors that push immigrants out of the country. The final solution must be focused on long term results and contain policies that address government and police corruption, underdevelopment, poverty, population growth, job creation via micro credit, the production of food for consumption, appropriate technology and development, increased penalties for human smugglers, and more effective border enforcement. The only way to reduce the flow of migration is to be realistic—it is a long-term project and requires special attention and participants must be dedicated to long term solutions.

That goes for Mexican policy vis-a-vis Central America as much as for U.S. policy toward Mexico.
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* I switch among the evening news shows in English and Spanish during commercials on ABC, which I tune in first. I worked for a few months for an ABC News documentary unit my first office job after high school, in 1964, so have always preferred ABC to the other networks. My Spanish is less than perfect, but I can understand a fair amount of newscasts, since Spanish newscasts use full sentences, unlike the grammatical fragments so in favor today on, for instance, the Fox News Channel (the "-ing thing": "Fox News talking in fragments", "Media annoying Schoonmaker with their willful violation of the rules of English".)

** Pregunta: ¿Cuál es el principal problema de Latinoamérica?
Pobreza 317 votos
Corrupción 890 votos
Inseguridad 71 votos
Otros 43 votos
1321 votos desde 22 dic
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,162 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM