After seeing Mexico this past week, it reminds me of a highway of sorts, with breakneck traffic going in opposite directions. In the right lane, millions of impoverished Mexicans, mostly from the inland areas of Oaxaca and Jalisco, are racing up to the United States, fed up with a corrupt Mexican government’s inability to offer the conditions of economic growth or to foster even marginal housing, education, and welfare.
But in the left lane, hundreds of thousands of affluent Americans head in the opposite direction southward to Baja and the Western coast of the Mexican mainland where they swarm over upscale resorts and buy pricey second vacation homes and condos on the shore. You can understand the logic of it in economic terms, but there is something Orwellian about the traffic patterns all the same. If the Mexican government has the ability to organize tourist and expatriate development in its most choice locations, surely it could do something in the interior to keep its own home–unless, of course, it wants its own without money to leave and foreigners with it to come.
Another odd observation: I don’t think I have ever seen a construction site in the United States where illegal alien workers have been loitering around, even for a second. Instead they are flurries of activity. But in Mexico it seems there are far too many workers per site, and they are about as busy as Greek or Italian construction workers. There is clearly something about American business organization, or the necessities of a free market, or perhaps the fact the more eager and desperate leave and the content stay that explains such a paradox visible even to the naked eye.
Finally, you would think after the chronic disruption in Oaxaca that the advocates of open borders would at last cease insisting that if we don’t let the spill-over into the United States, Mexico will have a revolution. In California most illegal aliens probably come from Oaxaca, which in turn recently has become one of the most unstable of Mexican states. Can it be, then, that illegal immigration that empties Mexico of its bread-winners and male heads of families results in more, not less, destabilizing social and cultural chaos?