Run For the Border

Does this shoe on the other foot make my head look empty?

In 2002, a dozen American college students, in Mexico legally, participated peacefully in an environmental protest against a planned airport outside of Mexico City. They swiftly found themselves deported as law-breakers for interfering in Mexico’s internal affairs.

If Mexico was willing to strip these students of their duly-obtained travel visas, imagine what it would have done had the students broken into the country surreptitiously—not just summary deportation but undoubtedly howls of complaint to the U.S. government for winking at this double violation of Mexican sovereignty. Open borders propagandists in the U.S. constantly present deportation as a patent act of cruelty that no right-thinking person would tolerate. Yet Mexico has no qualms about deporting not just illegals but legal immigrants as well whom it deems fractious.

You have to admire the Mexican elites. They have a clear-sighted understanding of their country’s national interest—which lies above all in getting as many Mexican citizens as possible into the U.S. for their billions of dollars in remittances—and they’re unapologetic about pursuing it. Mass demonstrations that include illegal residents demanding that Mexico override its laws to accommodate them wouldn’t cow those elites for an instant. Too bad American officials can’t summon the same commitment to the wishes of the American people, who overwhelmingly oppose the rewarding of law breaking.