As I’ve argued since the very beginning of the push for amnesty for illegal immigrants, this is a test of sovreignty.  Having lived and worked in Mexico for a considerable time, I certainly compassionate the people.  But the fact is that emigration to the United States has permitted the Mexican government for decades to continue abusing its own people.  Where there is no trust, there can be no real commerce, because everybody will seize a short-term gain at the expense of a longer-term one that might possibly produce a much greater yield.  Many of the Mexicans I knew in the DF (Mexico City and environs), while realizing that crime was rampant (an hour an evening was spent on one channel slowly scrolling through information regarding stolen vehicles), were actually more afraid of the overlapping police services than they were criminal elements.

Establishing a business in Mexico is not an easy task.  The bureaucracy is formidable.  Even to establish a bank account requires something close to an act of God, if one is a foreigner.  For my business, state regulations insisted that a majority of shares be owned by a Mexican national.  At the fringes of the ever-growing lunacy that is Mexico City, cinderblock shanty towns rise up.  Once there’s a certain density of population, they are free to petition the government for services.  Indios flood in from the countryside, many of them unable to speak Spanish.  Their children go begging or selling chicle, and learn the language, and navigate the city for their parents.

Windshield washers rush to your car at every stoplight in some parts of the city, particularly if you look like a foreigner.  There’s really but one traffic regulation in Mexico City: don’t have an accident.  At the lights, you will be offered ducks, chickens, perhaps even snakes in a plastic bag.

Out in the countryside, the vast natural wealth of Mexico is visible in Veracruz state, where in the highlands you can stop at a resting place and the natives will approach you with 5 kilo burlap bags of some of the best coffee on earth.  Further south, in Tabasco, the state oil company, PEMEX, rips access roads into the forest to drill, evicting those in the way.  The people band together to block the trucks, but the military arrives with riot gear and drubs them aside.  The country has lost control of Chiapas and much of Oaxaca, though they stage the occasional show of force.

 Still, at their own southern boundary with Guatemala, Mexican military emplacements are evident.  Sandbagged sentries stand watch with machine guns.  Passports and visas are required.  Truckloads of intercepted migrants are unceremoniously dumped at the border and watched across to find their way home as best they may.

 You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating.  Among those invited to the immigrant protests in Los Angeles were representatives of Mexico’s social services bureaucracy.  They have a vested interest in seeing that the status quo or something even less restrictive remain.  At the same time, as in other parts of the world, the informal position of the government and the MSM is that most of Mexico’s troubles can be traced to its having to coexist with the US.  The lapidary construction “So far from God and so close to the US” is on the lips of the intelligentsia and the people.  And yet the US is where many of them wish to be.

 Mexicans have a great deal of liberty, and very little freedom, at least in terms of rights.  Because it’s difficult for many to afford to visit a clinic or doctor’s office, many of the antibiotics that are dispensed in the United States only with a prescription are sold over the counter.  People self-diagnose, purchase penicillin or whatever other drug they think might work, and then take that until they begin to feel better; they generally do not consider whether the illness might be viral or bacterial in origin.  The result is that resistant strains arise.  People will undoubtedly accuse me of racism, claiming that I am depicting Mexicans as unclean.  That’s not so, but our own health services ought to be alive to the problem.  Not that they have any say in the matter.

 That’s why it’s completely galling to read stuff like this:

 Opinion makers and migrant advocates in Mexico said Friday that the collapse of U.S. immigration reform plans hurts Mexican workers, U.S. employers and anti-terrorism efforts. President Bush’s plan to legalize as many as 12 million unlawful immigrants from around the world while fortifying the border collapsed in the U.S. Senate on Thursday. “This is very bad news for Mexican migrants in the U.S.,” said Jorge Bustamante, special rapporteur to the U.N. human rights commission for migrants. “It means the continuation and probably a worsening of the migrants’ vulnerable conditions.”

The Rev. Luis Kendziersky, director of a shelter for migrants in the border city of Tijuana, said it appeared senators “are focused more on the political game than on the real needs of the people.”

“According to polls, the majority of the people (in the U.S.) want legality with concessions for undocumented migrants, but the radicals make a lot of noise,” he said.

An editorial in the national daily newspaper El Universal said, “It’s obvious that the politicians of that country want laborers, but they are not willing to legalize the labor that they need.”

Migrants “will continue to be subjected to extraordinary means of discrimination,” El Universal said. A “subculture of illegality” in border crossings also does nothing to aid the U.S. fight against terrorism, it said.
 

Let’s bracket the idea that Mexico wishes to maintain its own sovreignty and takes strenuous measures to do so, even while arguing against the US doing the same.   The fact is that illegal immigrants from Mexico to the US enjoy more rights here in fact than they do in Mexico in principle.  They have greater access to services.  They are able to work without paying taxes in many instances.  In some cases, as in traffic stops where they are routinely let go because police are told its a matter for immigration to deal with them, and immigration has neither the resources nor inclination to do so, they are actually held to lower standards in the eyes of the law than American citizens are.  In many cases where they would be subject in civil suits to confiscation of property, they haven’t any property to confiscate in the US because everything they’ve saved has been wired home.   It’s virtually impossible to enforce a US civil judgment in Mexico.

 While Americans are busy making their society amenable to Spanish-speakers, nothing reciprocal is happening south of the border.  Several times there, once in an incident that led to a bar fight, I was confronted by (drunk) people who overheard me speaking English (once when I was discussing with a friend a certain part of Othello) who held the opinion that English is a “racist language.”  The fact that they were telling me so in Spanish made me laugh at them (el gringo tiene juevos).

By and large, Mexicans of the enterpreneurial classes already belong to a “subclass of illegality,” bridling as they do against the demands of the bureaucracy, riddled as it is with nepotism, graft and corruption.  Mr. Bustamante may express concern at the treatment of Mexican migrant workers in the US, but the treatment of many Americans in Mexico who have, for example, been sold property in a manner that is deemed legal by local only to have it confiscated by the state on technical grounds hasn’t received much attention in the media.  To say that they haven’t much redress would be a gross understatement.

 I like and admire the Mexican people, and I wish them well, but the best thing that the US can do is to call for reform there.  They almost opted for a Chavez-allied socialist the last time around.  I had great expectations regarding Fox, who broke the grip of the PRI, but they didn’t pan out.  We have to stop footsying with such regimes and using only the carrot.  It’s the best way to help our fellow Americans.