The United States has enjoyed unique stature among the nations of the world. For over a century, we have been separated from the rest of the world by two oceans with two major friendly countries on our northern and southern borders. We have enjoyed particularly cooperative relations with both during this time. Times are changing with our northern neighbor adopting some restrictions not allowed by our Bill of Rights. More importantly, our southern neighbor has policies that are openly hostile to our country and deadly to our citizens.
The first of the two hostile policies is their refusal to stop migrants from traversing their country to arrive at our border with the notion of entering the United States illegally. The second is the production and transporting of harmful drugs that is killing our fellow citizens by the tens of thousands. Both of these policies feed the coffers of criminal cartels within the Mexican borders and are barely combatted by the Mexican government.
The flow of migrants is separate from what the Mexican government has done to encourage their own citizens to break our laws and cross our borders illegally. The principal purpose of sending their own citizens is two-fold. They don’t have to develop their own economic base where their citizens can stay in their country and keep their families together. These people are sending an estimated $60 billion annually from the United States to support their families and the floundering Mexican economy.
How does it help our country to employ people who then ship their earnings out of the country? They don’t spend it in our stores, they don’t pay for their healthcare, they don’t save for retirement. This is a trickle-out economics.
It has been suggested that we impose a 10% excise tax on those wire transfers. My suggestion is more like 25%. That will put a monkey wrench in the Mexican government’s scheme to freeload on our country and encourage illegal border crossing.
The second aspect of the illegal migrants entering our country from Mexico are the people traversing from Mexico’s southern border through their country to enter our country. Mexico is aware the people entering their own country from the worldwide movement have little interest in remaining there because of their dysfunctional national government and the rampant lawlessness. If Mexico was really our friends, they would halt all traffic coming through their own southern border and further stop them at other choke points throughout the country. They have made little effort to stop this because their criminal element profits significantly, which then feeds their corrupt regional and national governments.
The second reason to be concerned as to whether Mexico is our friend concerns the drugs coming across our southern border. Forty years ago, we had a serious problem with cocaine and heroin. Those were significant concerns but have become secondary to the much deadlier drug – fentanyl. As bad as the epidemic of cocaine and heroin was, it pales in comparison to fentanyl. Producing and using that drug outside of a proper medical application has virtually no reason to exist other than to kill people and in this case, Americans.
We know the drug is being produced in Mexico even if the raw materials are being created in China. Since Mexico’s current leader (Andrés Manuel López Obrador or “AMLO”) has taken office, there has been an explosion of fentanyl trafficking offenses as they have increased 950%.
AMLO has once again denied any responsibility or cooperation. “In Mexico, we don’t produce fentanyl,” he told reporters last month, once again pushing back at Washington. He blames the crisis on a lack of family values in the United States that drives people to use the drug. This comes from the man who destroys families in Mexico by shipping residents to the United States and has turned over large portions of his country to criminal operations threatening the safety of every family in large areas of the country which he is sworn to protect.
The amount of fentanyl seized (God knows how much was actually shipped) just in the month of March was 645 million deadly doses. This is causing the death of an average of 196 Americans per day. Every day. If we had an enemy army on our border killing that many Americans, we would certainly not consider them friendly.
Fortunately, a bi-partisan, bicameral group of Congressional members has proposed the Disrupt Fentanyl Trafficking Act of 2023. It calls for not only intervention of our law enforcement entities, but our military to intercede to crush the cartels and their supply lines in Mexico. This should sail through Congress. We have yet to hear from the Biden Administration as to whether they will support this proposed law.
We know AMLO is currently resistant. It might be because he has accounts in Switzerland and/ or the Cayman Islands. He claims it would harm the sovereignty of his country. As if the drug cartels are not harming his sovereignty. Since we have done this intervention with other countries in the past (Colombia) and never taken away any of their sovereignty, his argument rings hollow.
We will soon have a definitive test of whether Mexico is still our friend. As of right now it is clear to me that we could not have a more clearly defined enemy on our border.
