Mexico’s establishment party got kicked to the curb in Sunday’s election, winning only 16 percent of the vote, which should remind us that we are constantly told two rather contradictory things about immigration from Latin America:
—First, immigrants are pouring in from the banana republics of Central America not because Central America is (permanently) poor, but because Central America is (supposedly only temporarily) plagued by criminal violence.
—Second, there’s no need to worry about the overall number of immigrants coming to America because net immigration from Mexico is negative, or at least it was the last anybody checked in roughly 2009–2012. That’s because Mexico is finally (and permanently) not poor.
Yet Mexico, like Central America, has Sicario levels of crime, with the number of homicides hitting a new record last year. Further, crime in Mexico has been proliferating, from lucrative drug smuggling into the United States to chaotic domestic crimes like punching holes in oil pipelines and derailing trains.
Indeed, the proliferation of train robberies in Mexico sounds like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid crossed with Lawrence of Arabia. The Associated Press reports:
In the first quarter of this year, six times a day on average, robbers blocked tracks or loosened rails to stop trains, leading to dangerous derailments.
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And yet we never are told that Mexico’s criminality might be a good reason to, say, build the Wall.
You see, gang violence in Central America drives emigration to the U.S., while gang violence in Mexico does not. Or something. Nobody has really thought about it. Mexico doesn’t particularly interest high-IQ Americans.
Mexico, while reasonably prosperous, is a mess at present. As in some of the Central American banana republics, such as Honduras, the legitimacy of the government to fight crime is in doubt. Many in Mexico see the government as merely another cartel, albeit one with classier shoes. The AP notes that Mexico is facing:
…a new kind of crime involving whole neighborhoods defying police and military personnel…. Such “socialized” or “mass” crimes are spreading in Mexico as entire communities empty freight trains of merchandise or steal hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel from pipelines.
“The logic of the people is that they see politicians and officials stealing big time…and they see themselves as having the same right to steal as the big-time politicians,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, an international crime expert and research fellow at Columbia University.
We are constantly told that Central Americans are flocking to America to “escape violence.” Yet in Mexico the vast increase in criminal violence since 2006 has coincided with a lower level of emigration to the U.S., probably because the Mexican economy prospers from the drug trade. On the other hand, if disorder continues to spread in Mexico, the economy might well be hurt, which would make mass migrations to a once-again prospering America more likely.
Two big questions are whether the breakdown in Mexico will worsen over the next five months due to the upcoming regime change on Dec. 1, 2018; and whether the subsequent six years of a leftist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO), will turn out more like Venezuela or Bolivia.
