Complete the Wall, Fix Mexico

Victor Davis Hansen has a great piece on the outrage expressed by the Mexican government over the decision to complete the border wall, and how that wall just may help fix their country:

SELMA, Calif.--"Shameful," screams Mexico's President Vicente Fox, about the proposed extension of a security fence along the southern border of the U.S. "Stupid! Underhanded! Xenophobic!" bellowed his foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, warning: "Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall."

The allusions to the Berlin Wall made by aggrieved Mexican politicians miss the irony: The communists tried to keep their own people in, not illegal aliens out. More embarrassing still, the comparison boomerangs on Mexico, since it, and not the U.S., more resembles East Germany in alienating its own citizens to the point that they flee at any cost. If anything might be termed stupid, underhanded or xenophobic in the illegal immigration debacle, it is the conduct of the Mexican government.

"Stupid" characterizes a government that sits atop vast mineral and petroleum reserves, enjoys a long coastline, temperate climate, rich agricultural plains--and either cannot or will not make the necessary political and economic reforms to feed and house its own people. The election of Vicente Fox, Nafta and cosmetic changes in banking and jurisprudence have not stopped the corruption or stemmed the exodus of millions of Mexicans.

"Underhanded" also sums up the stance of Mexico, masquerading in humanitarian terms the abjectly immoral export of its own dispossessed. Indeed, such cynicism directly protects the status quo in three critical ways. The flight of the poor is Mexico's aberrant version of Fredrick Jackson Turner's safety-valve theory of the frontier. But instead of homesteaders heading west, the impoverished go northward, preferring simply to leave rather than change their government.

Hanson suggests that a tipping point was reached, and the illegal immigration we used to just ignore has now become a problem that needs to be fixed:

Americans liked their food cooked, yards kept and dishes washed cheaply--as long as the invisible workers with little education, less English and no legal status stayed invisible, and as long as illegal immigration could not directly be linked to plummeting public school test scores in the Southwest or 15,000 prison inmates in the California penal system. But somewhere around the year 2000 a tipping point was reached. The dialogue changed when the number of illegals outnumbered the population of entire states. There also began a moral transformation in the controversy, with the ethical tables turned on the proponents of de facto open borders.

Employers were no longer seen as helping either the U.S. economy or poor immigrants, but rather as being party to exploitation that made a mockery of the law, ossified the real minimum wage, undermined unions and hurt poorer American citizens. The American consumer discovered that illegal immigration was a fool's bargain--reaping the benefits of cheap labor upfront, but paying far more later on through increased subsidies for often ill-housed and poorly educated laborers who had no benefits.

[...]

So the world is upside down. The once liberal notion of ignoring illegal immigration is now seen as cynically illiberal. And taking drastic steps to enforce the law--including something seemingly as absurd as a vast fence--is now seen as more ethical than the current subterfuge that undermines the legal system of the nation.

If you secure the border, you fix many problems at once. America becomes more secure as the threat of terrorists coming in from the South decreases, and you force the Mexican government to reform itself so that its vast potential wealth can be used to promote its economy and its people, and not just a few politicians. It's a win-win.