Why Mexico is Always in Such a Mess: The U.S. is Its Enabler

August 5th, 2007 at 10:25am Mike McGarry 214

“I think we prefer to patronize the Mexicans or buy into their victimization argument. Mexico has everything, Lou: oil, gas, gold, silver, copper, beaches, historical artifacts. If Taiwan could lease Mexico for 20 years, we gringos would soon be whining about the colossus in the South.”

—Professor George Grayson, Mexico expert, during a CNN interview
 

Mexico has more than tripled its population numbers over the last 50 years, and by 2050 it is projected to add 43 million more to its numbers, to 148 million. Studies have shown that the opportunity—even just the prospect—to emigrate for citizens of nations and members of cultures with unsustainable population growth rates keeps them from implementing the necessary measures to stabilize their population growth. 

Not surprisingly, Mexico has no substantive population stabilization policy, and it is unlikely it ever will, given current mass immigration levels from Mexico into the U.S. Meanwhile, Mexico has three-million come-of-working-age citizens each year being dumped into a non-existent Mexican job market.             
 

Mexico, with a GDP larger than most European countries, will not invest its financial resources into primary education, although it does pamper the children of the elites with virtually free education at the University of Mexico. Latin American countries that have supported primary education have overtime grown viable middle classes. Mexico will never take this important step as long as the ruling elites of Mexico can get by with sending millions of their poor and uneducated into the U.S. for free educations.  

Mexico must—as should the U.S.—disentangle itself from NAFTA as it is currently constituted. Under NAFTA, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of farmers have been displaced from their lands, unable to compete with state-subsidized U.S. growers. The jobs that the NAFTA schemers of the globalony cowboy economy said would lift millions of boats in Mexico instead enjoyed a brief portage in Mexico and then turned right and sailed to Asia. Neither Mexican workers nor American workers have benefited from NAFTA. 
 

NAFTA was the original brainchild of “Harvard educated” former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, the economics genius who was the single most culpable factor in the devistating crash of the Peso in 1994. But don’t look for the needed change in Mexico’s presidential predilections in the near future. The biggest cheerleaders in the Western Hemisphere for NAFTA are Mexico’s recent past-president Fox and now Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon.  

Of course, no meaningful economic progress can be made in Mexico while it is held hostage to a seemingly ineluctable, culturally driven, deeply rooted, pandemic corruption. Mexico, sandwiched comfortably between those straight arrows Ghana and Panama on the world corruption index of Transparency International, is estimated to squander a full 10 percent of its GDP through corruption.

Generally speaking, cultural proclivities are driven from below-up; they are not top-down impositions. Truly rooting out corruption in Mexico would require a deep purging of the Mexican collective psyche, possible but unlikely.                

Mexico needs to redistribute its wealth to First World realities. Mexico’s ruling oligarchy, that hand full of families who make up the infamous “100 Families,”  has never made meaningful concessions to labor, while half of all the billionaires in Latin America are Mexicans, some of whom make Fortune Magazine’s lists of the disgustingly mega-rich.  Instead of investing in quick turnaround schemes, such as the currency market, Mexico’s elites would do better—if they really know what’s good for them in the long run —to invest in Mexico’s social and infrastructural future that would provide the jobs and sustainable incomes crucial to establishing and stabilizing Mexico’s long-term health and wealth.  There are some who say the U.S. should repatriate all Mexican illegals in the U.S—but that we should first arm them.  

The U.S. government should end its ongoing enabling of Mexico’s hacienda plutocracy.  Halting all immigration from Mexico would be a good start.     

George Grayson knows much about the elites of Mexico. He is probably America’s top Mexicologist. (My coinage)  He is a Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary whose expertise, credentials* and opinions are respected worldwide. Grayson has written more than 25 books and monographs on international affairs, including his new book which will be coming out next month, Mexico's Messiah Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

When it comes to the subject of Mexico, George Grayson knows whereof he speaks and writes.    

Professor Grayson will be appearing on radio KFNO’s Con Games on Wednesday, August 8, during the 8am-9am segment. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from someone who really knows the what’s so of Mexico.           

*George W. Grayson is a Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary. He  has made 160 research trips to Mexico and other countries of Latin America since 1976.  He is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies; an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute; a member of the board of advisers of the Latin American Adviser (Inter-American Dialogue); and senior adviser on Mexican affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Capital Insights Group. 

Grayson, who lectures at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, at the National Defense University, and at universities throughout the United States and Mexico, appears regularly on CNN. 

He has written more than 25 books and monographs on international affairs, including Mexico’s Messiah (Penn State University Press, 2007), Mesías Mexicano (Random House-Mondadori, 2006), Beyond the Mid-term Elections: Mexico Political Outlook: 2003-2006 (Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2003), Mexico: the Changing of the Guard (Foreign Policy Association, 2001), Strange Bedfellows: NATO Marches East (University Press of America, 1999); and Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? (Harcourt-Brace, 1998).  He was an official observer at the 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections. 

Grayson earned his Ph.D. at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. at the College of William & Mary.  He served a member of the Virginia state legislature from 1973 to 2001 and belongs to Phi Beta Kappa gwgray@wm.edu.

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