Fox Plans Reconquista. Bush Plans…?


You really have to tip your hat
to Mexican President Vicente Fox, who seems
determined to get the United States to change its
immigration laws and take in even more Mexican
immigrants than we do already. 
Ever since his election last summer, Mr. Fox
has been pushing a scheme under which the two
countries would essentially abolish their borders
and accept anybody from either country who wanted to
move in either direction.

The Fox
plan
is an absurdity on its face, because it
would not only open up the United States to the
unlimited drug smuggling and other
unpleasantness
bred in Mexico but also because
only Mexicans would make use of its open immigration
proposal.  How
many gringos do you imagine would flock across the
Rio Grande to seek honest work south of the border? 
Yet as silly as Mr. Fox`s plan is, last week
his emissaries were back
in Washington
with even sillier ideas.

The emissaries were Mexican
Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda and Interior
Secretary Santiago Creel, and the idea this time was
that Mexico would go the extra mile and actually do
something to control emigration to the United States
from its side of the fence. 
As Mr. Creel boasted to a news conference,
that in itself was no small concession from the
Mexicans.

"For the first time,"
Mr. Creel announced after he and his colleague
palavered
with Secretary of State Colin Powell
and Attorney General John Ashcroft last Wednesday,
"the Mexican government is recognizing that we
have a responsibility regarding the migratory
flows" into the United States. 
That sounds like progress of a kind, doesn`t
it?

Well, of course it was intended
to sound that way, but what Mr. Creel and his pal
really meant was that Mexico would undertake to
control what is sometimes called "cross
migration" — that is, not immigration of
Mexicans into the United States but rather the
immigration of non-Mexicans into Mexico for the
purpose of crossing it to enter this country.

But, as The Washington Post pointed
out,
it`s really not much of a concession. 
In the first place, non-Mexican illegal
immigrants coming from Mexico are mainly from
Central American states south of Mexico and
constitute a quite small proportion of the total
number of illegals each year — the vast majority of
whom come from Mexico itself. 
The Immigration and Naturalization Service`s figures
for 2000, for example, show less than 29,000
non-Mexican illegals detained by the Border Patrol,
as opposed to more than 1.6 million Mexican illegals
nabbed the same year. 
Mexico is pounding its chest at its generous
concession to help keep out other nation`s illegals,
but it offers to do nothing to control its own
illegal outflow.

But there`s a perhaps more
sinister edge to the Mexican proposal as well. 
By agreeing to help keep mainly Central
American illegals out of the United States, Mexico
would essentially establish a monopoly on the
illegal alien labor market in this country. 
It also would help to increase the number of
Mexican illegals in the United States, all of whom
remain Mexican citizens with voting rights in
Mexico.

Mr. Fox, as presidential
candidate last year, actually campaigned inside the
United States to pick up the votes of Mexican
citizens living here, and only last month he was
back in California vowing to establish improved
absentee ballot procedures for them by the next
election.

Now Mexico, ever since the U.S.-Mexican
war
of the 1840s, has nursed grievances about
all the territory it lost to the United States,
territory that is now the American Southwest.  Lots of Mexicans like to claim we stole the land and want it
back, and the Mexican government has never exactly
discouraged them from harboring that ambition.

By making sure that only
Mexican illegals flood over the U.S. border, Mr. Fox
and his government will vastly increase the number
of Mexicans here, and by facilitating the political
participation of Mexicans living here, legally or
not, in Mexico, he will discourage any tendencies
among them to assimilate as Americans and strengthen
all tendencies to remain Mexican. 
And when there are enough Mexicans living in
the United States who are Mexican citizens, the
American Southwest will simply cease to be part of
the United States and revert to Mexico.

Whether either President Bush
or the U.S. officials who met with Minister Castañeda
and Secretary Creel last week grasp what
might emerge from Mr. Fox` proposal to reform our
immigration laws is not known, but even if the reconquista
of the Southwest is not the Mexicans` secret
intention, that might still be the actual
consequence of what they are proposing. 
We know what the Mexicans think about the
reconquista.
  What
we don`t know is what their American counterparts
think — or what they will do to prevent it. 

COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS
SYNDICATE, INC.

April 09,
2001