* Mexico has immigration laws. It’s very easy to enforce them if you want to. And it’s humane, too. We don’t have byzantine bureaucracy delaying everything for decades. You can walk up to the border from Guatemala and just ask for a visitors’ permit and have an interview a few hours later but you can’t get away with taking a higher paying Mexican job because people will rat you out and the police do care, eventually. It’s the opposite of the USA where you can’t come legally without a phalanx of lawyers but there’s no enforcement at all if you come illegally.
* Net immigration between the USA and Mexico has been in the Mexican direction every year since 2007. That counts Mexicans coming to the USA, Mexicans going back, Gringos going to Mexico, Gringos going back, and foreigners moving between both countries. If you throw out the foreigners who are citizens of neither country, the net migration is even higher toward Mexico.
If it weren’t for the astonishingly high number of family reunification visas drawing people north, the net numbers would be even higher in the southerly direction; Mexicans who are only in El Norte for work are returning home in ever higher numbers. The long backlog of family green cards will keep migration north artificially high for years still. Those arrivals will resent America for the waiting and for making them commit to a move they wouldn’t even make by the time the free green card comes through.
And Mexicans are going south because Mexico is pretty great. Political reforms, neoliberal growth policies, education policy, and environmental reforms have delivered big improvements. Mexico’s life expectancy for nonsmokers is higher than the USA’s. Middle class Mexicans can afford to raise a family in a good school district. Mexican men are strong and confident while women are sweet, pleasing, and not emasculating Gringa harpies. Median young college educated Mexicans earn more (adjusted for cost of living) than median USA young college grads. Oh, and December isn’t miserable.
* In 1967, I accompanied my parents to look at the American retirement colony at Lake Chapala (where Fred Reed lives now, I believe). It was pretty nice.
Mexico is not doomed by nature to misery. It’s one of the more favored landscapes on earth.
And there are a lot of fairly easy steps to make it a better place, like more traffic stoplights.
I stayed in a hotel overlooking the main drag in Mexico City, the Paseo de la Reforma. The intersection below had no stop light even though it was one of major crossroads of the capital. It was fascinating to watch long lines of cars play Perpendicular Chicken with each other, but all the honking was kind of hard on the ears.
Jorge Castaneda implies that things like no stoplights are justified as keeping wimpy gringos out of Mexico. He says, however, that Mexicans would find they like not having to take their lives in their hands every time they try to walk across the street.
* Getting excited over ethnic food is so pre-2010s. More like 1990s and earlier.
Ditto “exotic” ethnic women. Wow, short, spindly, black hair and dark brown eyes, complexion varying shades of brown. So exotic. Not.
* So Frum points out that Republican insiders have been pushing wall-to-wall Latino vote strategy since 2012. They claim it’s the way back to the White House and the future of the party. And they never lose focus on that message.
Then they suggest that mass immigration is the way to appeal to Latino voters. Of course, mass immigration harms Latino citizens more than any other demographic. There is no one with most ruined neighborhoods, worse crime, or more competition for jobs from mass immigration than Latino US citizens. Making more of something they’re uneasy about isn’t going to win them over.
Of course, Republicans already run securely the governors’ offices, the Senate, and the House. And the national presidential race runs through states with very little Mexican-American influence. So there’s no obvious target that Republicans could reach even if they could win more Mexican-American vote.
So why are we getting such a narrative from Republican insiders? It might be just to push the donor class status signalling immigration explosion on fence sitters. Or it could be they’re stupid and nobody cares enough to explain it to them. I doubt Frum will make any impact.
Mexico would be a pretty easy place to improve. The Mexican concern is that they if they make it less cruddy it would get overrun by gringos.
* You can’t easily improve a high crime narco state like Mexico. Also Mexico’s racial demographics work against them. Mexico does not even make the list of the top 5 Whitest countries in Latin America percentage wise. Mexico has a glass ceiling due to it not being a majority White country. You can’t turn a country first world with only a 9 percent White population.
Mexico is San Bernardino on a much larger and worse scale. San Bernardino goes bankrupt after political power switches from White Gringo hands to Mexican hands. Mexicans don’t run cities like a well oil machine.
* San Bernardino is full of Walmarts and other national chains that are decently run by a mostly Mexican workforce. It doesn’t seem like Mexico couldn’t attain a Walmart level of prosperity and safety (although Owen would no doubt find it a change for the worse). Walmart itself was got off the ground by a bunch of hillbillies who figured out how to make things straightforward.
* A lot of things are getting better in Mexico. For example, the last time I checked (2011), used cars were really expensive in Los Angeles because as of 2006 Mexico had opened its border to American used cars, so they were vanishing from the Los Angeles market. But that means Mexico City’s fleet of cars is slowly turning into Los Angeles’ old fleet of cars, and Los Angeles cars have outstanding pollution controls. So residents of Mexico City have recently started to notice for the first time in decades as the smog lifts that they are surrounded by snow capped volcanos.
* At least one of the ethnic supermarkets in St Paul’s pan-Asian Frogtown (“pagodabodegas”?) uses Mexican stock boys. Is that a job young Asians won’t do? Or once you go outside your ethnic group, there’s no loyalty to race, at least among Asians?
For authenticity, though, the checkout girls are all Asian.
* Most Mexicans would rather work in a Nabisco (Mondelez) factory near their home and family instead of having to move to Chicago to work in that same factory. Even if they make less, their cost of living is lower too and they don’t have to live in a cold alien place full of uptight gringos and dangerous Negros. So, it seems like net Mexican migration has slowed to a crawl or even reversed.
The problem is that you still have Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc. where even Wal-Mart prosperity seems out of reach. Mexico is #67 in GDP rank but you have another another 130 countries below them. Places like Liberia and Somalia where the GDP/capita is less than $3/day and the main question is not whether you can afford a cheap flat screen TV for your hut but whether you will eat today.
* Technically, the worse a place is the easier it is to improve. The better it gets, the harder it is to improve further. But Mexico is on an upward trend so simple momentum might be enough for a while. Lately I’m enjoying the president’s Telecom Reform that is hoovering cash back from Carlos Slim’s wallet into mine at a pleasing pace.
* If the net flow of migration is southwards, how come all the border counties have been complaining about getting swamped the last two years? And why are there more and more native Spanish speakers that can’t speak a goddamned single word of English every year?
Hell, I was at Disney World a couple of weeks back, and some of the help at the Magic Kingdom couldn’t speak any English at all. And I’m talking about people in greeter-type roles, not just the people scrubbing the toilets.
The idea that Mexicans are leaving the country in droves is ludicrous on the face of it, and cannot be believed.
* I am currently living in Merida, Yucatan (population ~ 1 million; annual homicide rate ~ 2 per 100,000) and I think we have about 4 WalMarts here as well as Costco, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, Auto-Zone, Staples, Office Depot, McDonalds, Burger-King, Dairy Queen, etc., etc.
I, personally, don’t much like the heat and humidity; therefore, my (Mexican-born) wife and I are planning to eventually move back to Montana. But in terms of the people and the culture, it’s a toss-up between living here versus living in the USA.
In fact, if I had to live in some hell-hole part of the USA, like Southern California, then preferring to live in Mexico would be a no-brainer. It’s peaceful and idyllic here — especially now that all the Mexican criminals are in the USA.
* “Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test was administered to a representative sample of 920 white, Mestizo and Native Mexican Indian children aged 7–10 years in Mexico. The mean IQs in relation to a British mean of 100 obtained from the 1979 British standardization sample and adjusted for the estimated subsequent increase were: 98·0 for whites, 94·3 for Mestizos and 83·3 for Native Mexican Indians.”
And then let’s compare this to the racial composition of Mexico:
98.0: Mexican Whites
94.3:Mexican Mestizos
83.3: Mexican Amerinds
According to the CIA FACTBOOK, Mexico’s racial breakdown is:mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%
Things are not looking good Mexico way…..
Now, let’s turn to real world achievements.Mexico and the Nobel prize. According to WIKIPEDIA, three people of Mexican origins have won a Nobel:
Alfonso García Robles: With Alva Myrdal, got the Peace Prize in 1982. For what it’s worth, he looks very White in his WIKIPEDIA photo.
Mario J. Molina: Along with Paul J. Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland, he got the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studying the threat posed to the ozone layer by CFCs. Looks pretty White in his WIKIPEDIA photo.
Octavio Paz: 1990 Nobel in Lit. Based on WIKIPEDIA photo, he might have some Amerind ancestry (or he might not).
So, Three prizes. Total. As compared to 10 for Scotland, 15 for Australia, 23 for Canada, 74 for England , 306 for the USA, …..
Now, all of these figures are from WIKIPEDIA, so I’m sure that one could argue about the margins…but the overall portrait of Mexican achievement is pretty dire.
How about Fields Medalists?:
United States 12
France 10
Soviet Union (3) / Russia (6) 9
United Kingdom 7
Japan 3
Belgium 2
West Germany (1) / Germany (0) 1
Australia 1
British Hong Kong 1
Finland 1
Israel 1
Italy 1
Norway 1
New Zealand 1
Sweden 1
Vietnam 1
Iran 1
Brazil 1
(None Stateless) 1
I’ve left out Manjul Bhargava. His background is complicated.
So, Mexico has zero. Hell, all of Latin America has exactly one, which ties them with New Zealand.
Race creates the foundation upon which culture is built.Mexico’s racial mix produces mediocrity.In contrast, America’s overwhelming European racial stock allowed her to thrive.Mass immigration by Hispanic Amerinds and Mestizos is changing that.Soon, the USA will be as mediocre as Mexico.
