Leave it to Victor Davis Hanson – in my opinion, the single best columnist/commentator out there today – to explain the insane “relationship” that has developed over recent years between the United States and Mexico.
Here is the first half or so of Mr. Hanson’s just-published analysis. Please read it, and then tell me where/how President Donald Trump should move going forward:
Mexico—Friend, Enemy, Neutral, or Something Else?
Mexican nationals, likely cartel members, recently crossed the border and shot and wounded an American hiker. Did they assume that Joe Biden was still president, and so it was still a veritable open season on Americans without consequences?
Mexico also recently balked at allowing a U.S. transport plane to land, returning its own nationals apprehended as illegal aliens.
Was its attitude that Alejandro Mayorkas was still Homeland Security Secretary and thus working with Mexico to ensure that millions of illegal aliens could stay in the U.S. indefinitely?
After four years of Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into the U.S. and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.
Mexico either cannot or will not address the billions of dollars of raw fentanyl products shipped in—mostly from China—and then processed for export to the U.S. by its cartels across a nonexistent border.
Mexico seems to have little concern that some 75,000 Americans on average die from mostly Mexican-imported fentanyl each year—more deaths in just the last decade than all the Americans killed in action during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Who then is our friend, and who is our enemy?
This appalling death toll is in part due to the deliberate efforts of the cartels to mask fentanyl as less deadly narcotics or camouflage the poison by lacing it into counterfeit prescription drugs.
Mexico encourages its expatriate illegal aliens to send back some $63 billion per year in remittances. That huge sum constitutes one of Mexico’s largest sources of foreign exchange, surpassing even its tourist and oil revenues.
These billions are often subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. America’s local, state, and federal governments provide billions of dollars in food, housing, and health care entitlements that allow Mexico’s citizens, illegally residing inside the U.S., to free up the cash to be sent home.
According to U.S. census data, almost every year, the trade deficit with Mexico has increased from about $50 billion twenty years ago to $160 billion today.
That astronomical figure neither includes the $63 billion American outflow in remittances nor the multi-billion income from the cartels’ illicit drug sales in the U.S.
Did you know any of this?
I didn’t.
Does it make you feel incensed? Furious?
I do.
Does is make you wonder what the EFF the Biden administration was doing for four years as this proliferated – other than allowing it to happen and trotting out the despicable liar alejandro mayorkas to look us in the eye and claim the border was secure?
I do.
One other question: do you have any doubt at all that President Trump is going to DO something about this, and sooner rather than later?
Me neither.
Finally, thank you Victor Davis Hanson. You are a major asset. Please, please keep writing.
