Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

judiciary and an open media. And that its professed worries about its own citizens coming north to be exploited by American agribusiness resulted in a transitory policy of containment that was never really enforced and was largely ignored. Instead, the key to understanding Mexico's perplexing attitude toward America is simply found in Thucydidean exegesis: it is a proud state that was invaded twice by the United States and defeated, losing a great amount of its own territory - land which then thrived due to the very fact of its separation from Mexico. Those realities are not forgotten by Mexico. Japan might be defeated and humiliated by the United States, have its citizens in America incarcerated, its leaders hung and jailed, and its entire culture altered by American fiat - and then build an economic powerhouse to compete with and rival its former conqueror, all without constant tutorials about the evils of Okinawa. But Mexico seeks salve for its self-inflicted wounds in the history of a century past, rather than embrace honestly its own failures in the present.

The Irish government perhaps once regretted, but still accepted that its population had to leave or starve. Eastern European states were glad to see the Jews go on their journey to America. These governments lost control of their immigrants the minute they arrived in the United States. Such is not the case with Mexico, which both deliberately exports its unwanted and, once they safely reach American soil, suddenly becomes their champion and absent parent, as much out of resentment toward the United States as in real concern for people whom they apparently are so gladly free of.

At the heart of the problem with Mexico are class, race, politics and economics. Simply put, Mexican elites rely on immigration northward as a means of avoiding domestic reform. Market capitalism, constitutional government, the creation of a middle-class ethic or an independent judiciary will never fully come to Mexico as long as its potential critics go north instead of marching for a redress of grievances on the suited bureaucrats in Mexico City.

Supporters of financial bailouts and unrestricted immigration perhaps err when they claim that such engagement is necessary to prevent a Mexican catastrophe. Unfortunately, the opposite is more likely to be true: there is always catastrophe in Mexico, and our complicity - in addition to protecting American investment in  Mexico - postpones  an  evolution  in Mexican society that could finally force a rapacious aristocracy to the table for needed concessions.

Reform and transparency in Mexico are stalled - understandably, since every day's delay means more flight by the oppressed, not progress for the beleaguered who remain behind. One can imagine the state of politics in America should the nation's unemployed, uninsured and insecure decide to walk across the border to Canada by the millions each year: our reactionaries would have little to fear from the less affluent who stay, and our reformers would have little constituency. (Liberal Canadians, who now preen about their generally open immigration policies, would quickly fortify their border if thousands of starving and illiterate Americans began to pour into Toronto or Montreal every month to receive Canadian entitlements.)

To restructure the economy of Mexico, democratize the political system and legalize the courts would be to empower the Indians of the rural and mountainous hinterland, and thereby keep millions of them home as a vocal force for further change, rather than push millions and their problems northward. "Safety valve" is an inadequate term to indicate how useful a mass outflow of the poorest is for the Mexican status quo. This, after all, is a society sitting on a demographic time bomb of almost 100 million with a population growth rate of 2 percent per annum - and no feasible way of providing jobs, health care, social justice or personal safety to a nation half of which will soon be under the age of twenty-five. Without the promised land to the north, there might well loom either political revolution or African-style famine and plague.

The Mexican government's rationale - can we not detect its pernicious legacy also here in California? - is that the Yanquis and gringos once invaded the country, stole the land and rigged the border to harm permanently the Mexican people, who, through no fault of their own, are now crowded into too little space and find themselves oppressed by el Norte and the evil Anglos. The legacy of autocracy, a corrupt legal system, tribalism, statism, endemic racism, poor education, an absence of family planning, the lack of religious diversity and a nationalism of bad faith are rarely mentioned in Mexicans' inventory of the causes for the massive pell-mell flight of its citizens northward.

No wonder the Mexican government so often slanders us, alleging unprovoked hostility in our rather pathetic attempts to plug the border with wire, steel and concrete as well as overworked and much-maligned border guards. Some pundits in Mexico City like to compare our feckless efforts at keeping Mexicans out to the Berlin Wall and other old communist partitions designed to keep citizens in. Yet walls historically bring a painful honesty to problems. They brutally define the nature and the direction of human traffic. Communist fortifications were an admission that people wanted out. A fenced Hong Kong, on the other hand, was proof that nobody was dying to reach Peking. The wall currently proposed by the Israelis is anathema rather than a godsend to Palestinians, who, it turns out, want the freedom to enter hated Israel for work, commerce and profit - and perhaps even to secure safe transit to Brooklyn - rather than cross into a kindred Lebanon or Jordan. Closer to home, our border barricades are a painful reminder that no American wants out, but millions of Mexicans most assuredly want in to the United States - a stark truth that cuts through almost all the nonsense about immigration and race that emanates from both sides of the border.

Other advantages surely accrue to the Mexican status quo from its leaders' deliberate export