Annex Mexico

A couple of prominent bloggers have suggested, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that the answer to the immigration problem is simple: Annex Mexico. First James Lileks:

The entire illegal immigration problem isn't that difficult. Just annex Mexico. Upside: lots of oil at popular prices. Downside: Once the Mexicans are Americans, they will presumably be unwilling to put up drywall or pick tomatoes, since those are "jobs Americans will not do." So maybe that's not a good idea.

Try this, then: Build a wall, tall and long. If you really want to horrify the world, put barbed wire on the top; this signals your intention to violate the most basic human right, namely, the right to go to California for dental care at someone else's expense.

Next step: Make current illegal aliens register, pay a fine and get on the path to legal status. The Amnesty That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Anyone who doesn't pony up gets shipped to the border. There you have it! Security, compassion, firmness. Drywall.

Read the whole thing.

Then we have Glenn Reynolds:

In fact, they're leaving Mexico because its corrupt and thuggish political culture stifles economic growth and opportunity. The people there are smart and hardworking, after all, and they tend to do just fine when they get here. They're leaving because being smart and hardworking is enough to get you ahead in the United States, but not in Mexico. And I suspect that if the Reconquista advocates somehow did get their way, and the Southwest United States became a new Northern Mexico, we'd soon have illegal immigrants crossing over into Kansas and Oklahoma for opportunity, because the Mexican political culture would have ruined things in Arizona and Texas just like it's already ruined them further south.

So maybe we've been thinking about this the wrong way. Instead of worrying about Mexicans invading America, maybe what we need is for the United States to annex Mexico.

Oh, we don't need to turn Mexico into a state, or several. At least not right away. But as part of any immigration deal, the United States needs to demand reform in Mexico. Serious political reform, and serious economic reform.

And reciprocity. If we're going to make it easy for Mexicans to come to the United States to live, work, hold property, and get public benefits without too much paperwork trouble, we need to make it easy for Americans to do the same in Mexico. Right now, as several people have noticed, the environment there is considerably less friendly to foreigners than America's is.

But as the Mexican government has been free to express opinions about how the United States should set immigration, economic, and educational policy, it seems only fair if we do the same for them.

It's an interdependent world, after all. And that works both ways.

Of course another option is to simply give them parts of the U.S. that we really don't want anymore, like New Orleans or Detroit. Then wall those areas off and be done with it.

UPDATE: Scrappleface reports on the yesterday's counterprotest in which millions of hard working Americans skipped the demonstrations and went to work.