Estimates suggest that there are eleven million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.
A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.
Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.
First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the twelfth-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan, or Chile.
Mexico also is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and earns billions in foreign exchange from visitors. It enjoys a temperate climate, is rich in minerals, and has millions of acres of fertile farmland and a long coastline.
In addition to being strategically located as a bridge between North America and South America, Mexico has ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
It is not an overcrowded country: Mexico ranks in the lower half of the world in population density. Too many people and too little land are certainly not the reasons why millions of Mexicans either emigrate or wish to emigrate to the United States.
Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.
Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt to an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?
The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.
Mexico — unlike, say, Japan or Switzerland, which are far less naturally endowed and yet far wealthier — has never fully adopted Western paradigms of free-market economics, constitutionally protected free speech, due process, gender equity, private property rights, an autonomous press, government transparency, an independent judiciary, and religious diversity and tolerance.
To the degree that Mexico can make strides toward these goals, its population will stabilize and become more affluent — and also become less likely to emigrate.
More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare, multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements, even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.
Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.
Indeed, if the U.S. treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never emigrate to the U.S.
In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical.
After all, the Mexican government is quick to fault the U.S., but it is rarely introspective.
I guess it boils down to: what will it take for Mexico to break all the drug cartels?
They control farmland, towns, countryside, police, media army, even enslave people.
Without them and the drugs they want to make and sell Mexico could be a decent, fairly wealthy country for all its people.
They don’t want to look a gift burro in the mouth; they get rid of their most poor and in return get billions in currency sent back home; their second largest source of foreign income.
December 11, 2019 – Doctors with flu shots for migrant children turned away from Calif. facility; 6 arrested
CHULA VISTA, Calif. – Federal authorities arrested six protesters after doctors offering flu vaccines to detained migrants were turned away at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s San Diego-area headquarters.
Doctors for Camp Closure, an organization that opposes detention of migrants and refugees attempting to enter the United States, protested with upwards of 70 people, including physicians, outside the Chula Vista, California, facility Monday.
The protests began after CBP denied the organization’s request to give flu vaccines to detained migrants.
Several protesters could be seen on video blocking both driveways of the facility by lying down. They say they were spreading the message that basic healthcare and hygiene is a human right.
“People die of the flu, but the people who have died of the flu in CPB custody, it was completely preventable,” Dr. Julie Sierra said. “Keeping people in hygienic conditions and not overcrowding them and giving them soap and access to showers, that can help prevent illness. But nothing prevents the flu like a flu vaccine.”
At least three children in U.S. immigration custody died from flu infections during the 2018 flu season. That’s nine times the mortality rate of the general pediatric population, according to Doctors for Camp Closure.
One of those children was 16-year-old Carlos Vasquez from Guatemala, who was found dead May 20. Video released Thursday by ProPublica shows the teenager suffering from a 103-degree fever. He collapses on the floor, where he lies for several hours before being found.
CBP said in a statement it is investigating the 16-year-old’s death to “ensure all procedures were followed.”
In light of the deaths last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended CBP vaccinate detained migrants against the flu virus in a Nov. 7 letter, according to the Washington Post. CBP officials said the agency has never provided immunizations for detained migrants, and it would not do so.
The CDC recommends flu vaccines for nearly everyone ages 6 months and older in the U.S., as they reduce the risk of flu illnesses, hospitalizations and the potential for flu-related death in children.
November 12, 2019 – US held record number of migrant children in custody in 2019
@Greg: There aren’t enough flu vaccines to go around for CITIZENS; what the HELL are we doing vaccinating uninvited illegal immigrants imposing themselves on us?
@Deplorable Me, #4:
That’s the point. We’re holding them packed together in detention facilities and we AREN’T vaccinating them against influenza. Nor are we allowing volunteer medical personnel to administer vaccine at private expense.
The only 2019 vaccine supply shortages are for the high-dose preparations intended for adults over age 65.
@Greg: We can track these children much better today, what happened to the many many thousands of children that came some on top of trains during the Obama administration the ones that didnt end up as slaves in chicken farms, where are the children? I hope they suffered no trauma as they were handed back to traffickers. I wonder how many suffered trauma left in the desert to die. You know you are quoting the same NGO bleeding hearts that also attacked Obama in the courts. Useful idiot.
@Greg:
Oh, we are? Well, what the hell are they doing there? OH! That’s right… DEMOCRATS lured them all here by instructing them how to exploit immigration loopholes and inciting them to flood our resources to get immediate release.
Were they receiving flu vaccines where they came from? BULLSHIT.
When you forcibly hold children in custody, you become morally responsible for their welfare for however long you do so. We don’t want to become a nation that thinks otherwise.
@Greg:
No one is “forcibly” holding children in custody. Let them go back to the nation they came from and there they can get their flu vaccines.
You are always whining about the national debt. How much do you think the care for UACs cost the American taxpayer every year? Why are we supporting the children of another nation?
@Greg: But we aren’t obligated to bring their health care up to US standards. Like an armed robber facing lethal force, you enter the country illegally at your own peril. Democrats exploit it for their own political gain and the more misery and suffering that results, the more they can exploit it.
Thanks to Democrats, we are becoming the barbaric kind of country that murders newborn babies and kills those in the womb right up to the moment of birth. Don’t try to sell that shit about “compassion” for illegal immigrants; all any Democrat cares about is how much and how many ways they can be exploited.
@retire05: We support them because the are fodder for the DNC.
Sorry, but I think I’ll hang on to America’s better humanitarian standards. There’s no justification for keeping volunteer medical personnel from providing influenza vaccinations to children at no cost to U.S. taxpayers. Actually, they should be routinely provided by the facilities holding them. It’s not like the children made the decisions that landed them in their current circumstances. They’re not to blame.
If you’re going to be cold-hearted and vindictive about it, consider what the costs to taxpayers would be of influenza outbreaks among the 4,000 or so non-vaccinated children presently being held—you know, hospital costs, costs associated with returning dead bodies to their families, etc.
@Greg:
You believe in no such thing. While you support threatening children who wear red caps with murder, support industrial scale abortion, including killing babies the temerity to be born alive anyway, you claim you support humane treatment. You support open borders despite the surge in citizens killed by illegal immigrants and, while illegal immigrants all have places to live, AMERICANS are homeless.
Don’t claim anything “humanitarian” in your motives; Democrats want to EXPLOIT illegal immigrants. At the border, they exploit them for political argument, using misery and tragedy to promote their agenda. Once they get loose in the population, they exploit them for cheap labor and votes.
Illegal immigrants have come here, illegally, and exposed THEMSELVES to the flu, so we will ignore citizens who need vaccine to inoculate illegal immigrants. Typical liberal stupidity. MORE proof that NO Democrats should have political power anywhere in this country.