Mexicans should be outraged with Mexico

DallasBlog.com | Scott Bennett:

“The President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, is ‘outraged.’ So, for that matter, are all Mexican politicians along with most central American politicians and more than a few from Brazil. They are right to be outraged. The fact that millions of their people are risking their lives to flee their Mexican (and other Latin) homeland to seek economic refuge in the United States indicates a failure of the Mexican state so complete that every Mexican should be outraged.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

I don't know how much outrage President Vincente Fox is really feeling. Politicians are given to hyperbole. And I don't know how much outrage Scott Bennett is really feeling, either. There's a lot of posturing going on on both sides of this debate.

Yes, millions of Mexicans are moving to Texas and Arizona and California seeking economic opportunity. So are millions of Americans from Michigan and Ohio and New York moving. The difference is that the native Texans are more outraged with the Mexican immigrants than with the Yankees moving in. (Maybe only a little ;-) Should the Michiganders be outraged at their governor? Well, maybe, but this has been going on forever, since the Tennesseans posted signs saying "Gone to Texas" and Horace Greeley advised "Go west, young man.".

The comparison of a border fence with the Berlin Wall is imperfect. Sure, they are both designed to stop the free flow of people. From the viewpoint of a poor Mexican desperately seeking work, does it really matter whether it is the US or Mexico that builds the fence? The effect is the same on the poor. But everyone understands the difference between a defensive measure (the border fence) and an authoritarian crackdown on one's own citizens (the Berlin Wall). The analogy is just incendiary. Opponents of the fence are best advised to drop it.

And supporters of the fence should quit defending it with the argument that it'll stop drugs and terrorists. Drugs will keep coming across the border in trucks and planes. And terrorists are as likely to cross the Canadian border as the Mexican border, but no one is proposing a fence across our northern border. No, the border fence serves one purpose. That's to keep out poor Mexicans and Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

In the end, no fence is going to relieve the pressure building up by the disparity of wealth on the two sides of the border. Americans would be better off spending our time and effort and resources bringing jobs and prosperity to Mexico. Ultimately, that's the only way America will be able to retain its own prosperity.