Yes, Mexico Knows Exactly What It Is Doing

By Victor Davis Hanson 

President-elect Donald Trump recently had a “talk” with newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about the millions who have crossed through Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally.

But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.

Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What, then, is going on?

How does the strange U.S.-Mexico supposed co-dependence seem to work?

About 60 percent of the Mexican people traditionally in polls have voiced a positive view of the United States, yet a surprisingly low number when considering the millions who try to cross its border illegally each year.

Logically, some 61 percent of Mexicans in a recent 2024 Pew Center Research Poll voiced favorable views of the United States, whose open borders, generous welfare systems, billions of dollars in remittances, and now-defunct immigration laws they see as entirely in their interest. In contrast, 60 percent of Americans, one of the highest numbers on record, now hold unfavorable views of Mexico, perhaps because of the cynical harm it has done through a perforated border.

Mexico says its emigrants, along with those from Central and South America who cross its own borders with relative ease—often with tacit support—supply America with generations of industrious, low-cost labor, robbing it, in a sense, of millions of its own citizens.

In truth, Mexico would face insolvency if it did not receive its current some $63 billion in U.S. remittances, largely sent by its own people who crossed into the U.S. illegally. Trump talks of levying a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports should Mexico not cease undermining the American border. An additional lever would perhaps be to slap a 30 percent tax on all remittances sent from the U.S. to Mexico. That would both encourage capital to stay in the U.S. and raise over $20 billion in excise fees, more than enough proverbially to “pay for the wall.”

However, such largess is still more one-sided since much of the remittances are made available through not just the industriousness of Mexican expatriates but also the generosity of American taxpayers. Their multifaceted subsidies to the undocumented free up billions for them to help support millions of Mexico’s poor in a fashion that Mexico City apparently is either unable or unwilling to ensure.

The annual flight of millions from Mexico is a sort of updated version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier safety valve theory” of the American West. Accordingly, the Eastern poor and potentially rebellious fled westward in hopes of a new, better life rather than marching on Washington for cancellation of debts or redistribution of property. Mexico City apparently feels that without their own El Norte “frontier,” millions of southern and indigenous Mexican citizens might instead head en masse to Mexico City.

Mexico, which also helps China avoid tariffs on its exports to the U.S. by assembling its products in NAFTA and tariff-free Mexico, certainly knows that the Chinese seek both to profit from its cartel ties and to kill Americans and undermine its security in the bargain. The macabre gambit is likely seen as the Chinese version of an updated Opium War payback, with the twist that the former addicts are now the suppliers.

While in office, former President Obrador often said strange things. Two of the most pugnacious were his high-five boast that some 40 million of his own citizens had fled Mexico to cross the border: “Just imagine. There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.” (Obrador never explained why his own citizens would willingly flee their own country to a nation habitually caricatured in the Mexican press as racist and exploitive.)

Indeed, in 2023, Obrador urged American Hispanics to never vote for Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign—an irony given Mexico’s chronic complaint of Yanqui interference in Latin American politics.

Obrador believed, as many presidents before him no doubt concurred, that the 40 million expatriates and Mexican-American children, if they were distant from Mexico long enough, would romanticize the country, and so, like most immigrants, become a powerful lobbying force on Mexico’s behalf.

In sum, Mexico understands the myriad ways that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and emigration of millions of its own citizens to America are entirely in its own interests and so hopes to see the continuation of the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas appeasement.

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

First published in American Greatness