- (december 2007)
The Mexican civil war.
Media coverage of the Mexican war on drugs has been scant, unlike the much more
publicized civil war in Colombia. However, Mexico is under constant threat
and Mexicans are living under a form of terror that is worse than anything the
USA has experienced with Al Qaeda.
Since Bush the first declared the "war on drugs" almost two decades ago,
the drug cartels have been clearly winning that war. The drug business
has increased, and drug cartels have more freedom than ever.
Mexico (the main entry point for drugs sold to the biggest consumer of drugs
in the world, the USA) has become a battleground.
In december 2007 the Mexican government had to dispatch thousands of additional
troops to reinforce a crackdown on drug gangs in the northern state of
Tamaulipas. There are now about 25,000 federal police and soldiers (in addition
to the local police) who fight the war on drugs along the border with the
USA.
Thousands of Mexicans have died in this war.
Unsolved murders are widespread all over Mexico.
Several musicians have been killed in the last two years by drug gangs,
starting with Valentin Elizalde in november 2006.
The biggest mystery of all concerns the 4,000 unidentified people buried in
common graves in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. They include
360 women killed over the past 14 years. The Mexican authorities have made
little effort to identify the victims or to solve the cases, but it is widely
believed that many of these nameless bodies are the "collateral damage" of the
war on drugs.
The timid response by Mexican officials is not surprising: any police officer
who stands up to the drug cartel becomes a target. For example,
the drug cartels killed the police chief of the border town of Tijuana
(shooting him 50 times) after the police had shut down a drug-smuggling tunnel
under the border.
The business of smuggling drugs into the USA is a very lucrative business.
The USA is the biggest consumer of drugs in the world.
Ultimately, these are the victims of all the "respectable" USA citizens who
do drugs at their parties.
Mexico should start asking the USA to bomb private USA residences and arrest
USA private citizens instead of trying to fight (and lose) a battle against
druglords who can arm themselves with the money that they receive from those
USA citizens. There will be drug dealers, smugglers and cartels in Mexico
for as long as there is a lucrative market for drugs in the USA.
The drug war can be won only if the USA starts punishing the consumers, not
the dealers.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2007)
The problem with Hispanic immigration to the USA.
The USA is about to legalize 12 million illegal immigrants, in what will
amount to the biggest amnesty ever recorded in the history of the world.
There is probably nothing unusual in the USA admitting millions of
"undocumented" immigrants. In fact, the history of the USA is the history
of millions of such immigrants landing in New York and looking for work,
no more and no less than what these 12 million people are doing right now.
The USA became the world's superpower thanks to the millions of immigrants
who came from Europe, Africa and the Far East.
Economists seem to agree that, financially speaking, the benefits will
outweigh the costs. There will be 12 more million tax payers and there will
be 12 more million full-time consumers. We are simply making easier for those
12 million people to contribute to the USA economy.
Contrary to what populists like Lou Dobbs claim, these 12 million people
will not steal anybody's jobs: they already did. The USA has been adapting
to jobs "stolen" by poor immigrants for two centuries. The USA economy is
powerful precisely because it keeps absorbing low-paid workers at the bottom
while pushing existing workers higher up. Those who fail to climb up the
social ladder are a minority. The system may be cruel, but it has worked
wonders. In fact, countless regions of the world, from Europe to the Middle
East, are beginning to copy the same idea.
There are three problems though, and, as usual, few people are focusing on
the wrong problems.
The first one is not a USA problem, but a problem for everybody else.
If the USA simply opened its borders to anyone who wants to come, the result
would be easy to predict: nearly six billion people would abandon their
countries and move to the USA. Even hardcore nationalist Europeans and Muslims
are keen on emigrating to the USA. This clearly would not be a solution to
the problems of the world: abandoning the world planet to live in just one
country would be a little silly, to say the least. Thus encouraging
immigration might be a solution for the USA economy but it should not be viewed
as a solution for the rest of the world (both developing and rich countries).
If the entire population of Mexico moved to the USA, this could hardly be
viewed as good news for Mexico. Therefore emigration to the USA is a problem
for Mexico. Many of the Mexican immigrants who will contribute to the progress
of the USA could have contributed to the progress of Mexico. Therefore those
emigrants are a net loss for Mexico, just like Giannini (the Italian founder
of Bank of American) was a net loss for Italy.
Ditto for any other country that loses emigrants to the USA.
The second problem is that any amnesty for criminals is unfair to honest
people, and this one is no exception. There are thousands of legal
immigrants who have gone through the proper process for obtaining a "green
card". Some of them have been waiting for years, abiding by all the rules.
They are now discovering that it would have been better for them to break
the law. Anyone who followed the law will be soon at a disadvantage over
those who broke the law. To be fair, the USA should at least grant an immediate
green card to everybody who has applied over the last few years and even
to anybody who has been denied one. They were all more "honest" than the ones
who simply crossed the border and never even bothered to figure out how to
obtain legal status. The USA also exposes itself to ridicule when it
subjects airline passengers to the lengthy searches and interrogations
while letting 12 million people simply cross the border and settle in the USA.
What is the logic by which an airline passenger has to go through immigration
at an airport while millions of pedestrians can just walk across the border?
What makes a pedestrian more desirable as an "illegal" immigrant than an airline
passenger?
The third problem is not usually discussed because it's easy to be accused
of racism. But even a blind man can tell what is truly different between
today's "illegal" immigrants and the immigrants of a century ago: today they
mostly come from just one country. Italians, Irish, Chinese and Polish
immigrants came by the millions, but they were never 80-90% of the total.
One could not talk of an Italian or Polish "invasion". They were just one
of the many ethnic group entering the USA. What is unique about today's
immigration is that it is mainly Hispanic and in particular Mexican.
Each group contributed to shaping the USA, but it was just one of the many
groups. Today's illegal immigrants are virtually the only group that is
altering the nature of the USA society. There is no other group to balance
the contribution of these 12 million Mexicans.
The fact that states such as California decided to adopt Spanish as a second
language (whereas they never adopted Chinese or Italian as a second language)
proves precisely what is unique about today's "illegal" immigration: that it
does qualify as an "invasion" from one country only.
One can easily dispel the notion that this comment is racist in nature.
First of all, we would not be as concerned if the 12 million immigrants came
from a broad spectrum of countries. If 3/4 million came from Africa and 3/4
million from Asia and 3/4 million from Hispanic America, there would be no
"racial" concern.
If we really have to absorb 12 million people, why not ask all the people of
the planet (and not only Mexicans) to emigrate to the USA and then pick 12
million without any discrimination of race, gender, religion or nationality?
By accepting only those who live next door, the USA is de facto discriminating
against the rest of the world.
Secondly, USA consumers are perfectly happy to buy Mexican products. The problem
is that Mexico produces very little for export (other than people). If Mexico
built good cars like South Korea does or good cell phones like Finland does
or good shoes like China does, USA consumers would be happy to buy Mexican
cars, phones and shoes. In fact, when Mexican factories build these things,
USA consumers are their main customers.
The issue that this Mexican "invasion" poses is ideological more than anything
else. It may change the nature of USA society in a way that no previous
immigration since the founding of the USA did.
There have been books dealing with the effect on the USA society of the
massive immigration of Hispanics, and notably
Samuel Huntington's "Who Are We" (2004), but they tend to focus on the
fear that Hispanics want to maintain their own identity rather than integrate.
While this is largely true, it is nothing new: the Irish, the Italians and
the Chinese did the same (to the point that Congress even passed laws banning
Chinese immigration for a decade). Not to mention the Jews, who still constitute
a community within the community in the vast majority of cities where they live.
There is nothing new in the reluctance of immigrants to lose their roots,
their language, their values.
What these analysis miss is, in my opinion, the real "danger" that comes with
the Hispanic wave, which is a danger of a different nature.
The USA society was founded by Europeans who transplanted a set of
cultural values. Those were mainly values of progress.
The USA was founded when the European culture was at the peak of its passion
for progress (both in terms of exploration and innovation).
Thus the USA was largely founded on science/technology.
The public sphere was largely founded on a passion for knowledge.
The private sphere, in the meantime, was
largely founded on the monogamous morality of Catholics, Protestants and Jews.
The first non-European wave of immigrants, from China, largely shared those
values. The Chinese too came from an ancient civilization that had
traditionally valued the arts and the sciences, and they too valued
family in a way similar to the European immigrants.
While the Chinese had a much harder time to adapt to a Christian country,
they nonetheless did not weaken in any way its moral infrastruture. In fact,
they may have reinforced it.
Ditto today for immigrants from India, Africa (modern African countries), the Islamic world, Eastern Europe and Far Eastern countries.
The emancipation of the black slaves after the Civil War introduced in the
USA society for the first time an element that was significantly different from
the European and Asian elements that had forged the USA society until that
moment. The culture of African slaves (whether it was transplanted from Africa
or artificially created by white masters) was a culture that had very little
interest in exploration or innovation. The African-American culture had a much
looser view of family, and therefore sexuality.
It is not a coincidence that the emancipation of Blacks
largely coincided with the sexual liberation among whites, and with the rise
of sociocultural movements that replaced the work ethic with an ethic
of partying (from the Jazz Age to the age of the hippies to the age of discos).
As Blacks infiltrated white society deeper and deeper during the 1960s and
following decades, these elements became more and more prominent.
The easiest way to see this African-American influence is on sexual habits,
that changed dramatically: today's average white person has adopted the
(promiscuous) sexual habits of the black slaves of the 19th century.
(Music is a fitting metaphor for the change in values: the erosion of
traditional white values and adoption of black values has paralleled the
mainstream acceptance of black music, from blues to jazz to funk to hip hop).
In the 2000s USA Blacks are still much less likely than whites
to invest in "exploration and innovation": very few graduated from college
and very few engaged in international travel or even nature-oriented hobbies.
While much of this may be due to a lingering form of discrimination against
Blacks, at least part of it is still due to a black culture that assigns little
value to education.
Since the 1970s a second non-European and non-Asian element has infiltrated
the USA society: Hispanic immigrants. They too come from a part of the world
that has been traditionally driven by different values. In particular,
Latin America has contributed very little to "exploration and innovation".
How many inventions have come from Latin American countries?
Despite the advantage of having been independent for 200 years and having been
spared two world wars, Latin America has contributed amazingly little to
world civilization.
Latin America, that had all the possible
advantages among developing countries, has been passed
by Asia, Eastern Europe, the Islamic world.
See Who is being left behind.
(Again, music is a fitting metaphor. Latin rhythms embody a
spirit of life that has more to do with freenwheeling fun and sex than with
the work and innovation ethics of the original settlers of the USA; i.e.
the USA society is being seduced by Latin music the same way that it was
seduced by black music, a phenomenon that parallels the way the USA society is
being infiltrated by the Latin view of life).
The effect of this infiltration was being felt for the first time in the 1990s
(Hispanic population grew to 35.3 million between 1990 and 2000, a 58% jump).
Historically,
this is second major element to enter the USA society that is markedly
different (as far as cultural values go) from the original elements
of the USA society.
The Hispanic wave of immigration may therefore cause deeper changes
into the very fabric of USA society, further decreasing the motivation towards
"exploration and innovation".
There are many false problems. It is not true that Mexicans bring crime:
the vast majority come to the USA to work, not to rob banks.
It is not true that Mexicans are dirty or uncivilized: thanks to a stricter
education, the vast majority are tidier and
more polite than the average USA-born citizen. Even in terms of basic education
(history, geography, math) Mexican-born kids have little to envy of
USA-born kids.
It is at a different level that one fears the "damage" that the Hispanic
minority may cause. The Hispanic societies are traditionally less interested
in the values of progress and discovery that fueled the growth of the USA.
(There is, after all, a reason if one became the world's superpower and the
others became poor underdeveloped countries).
Basically, the Hispanic immigrants may slowly turn the USA into yet another Hispanic country.
And, somehow, this does not sound like a compliment. In fact, the Hispanic
immigrants themselves don't want to live in a Hispanic country.
The proper solution would be for the Hispanic people to change their own
countries so as to make them more similar to the USA, capable of replicating
the success of the USA.
Then all these issues would go away.
As it stands now, the 12 million Mexican immigrants are an ideological
paradox: they flee a failed Hispanic model for an Anglosaxon model, but then
they may introduce a force to undo that Anglosaxon model and recreate
a Hispanic-style society.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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