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A Marshall Plan for Mexico


Bill Clinton`s chief-of-staff, now a Washington insider, has just proposed a Marshall Plan of subsidies for Mexico:

“Thomas McLarty said the United States should partner with Mexico, and to a lesser degree with Canada, in a `Marshall Plan` effort — named for the U.S. aid offensive for a ravaged Europe after World War Two — that could inspire Mexico`s work force to remain at home.
“`In Mexico, we need to consider some type of Marshall Plan,` McLarty told a Latin American energy conference in a San Diego suburb. McLarty said the three countries could provide $20 billion in development aid over a 10-year period.
“`That sounds like a lot of money, and it is,` said McLarty, who served as White House chief of staff from 1993 to 1994 and is now a consultant. `Consider that the United States spent $100 billion in Iraq in just this past year. Unless we help out our neighbors to the south, and especially Mexico, we will continue to have this issue of immigration which will hurt our relations.`”

A week before 9/11, I kicked the same idea around in VDARE.COM in my article “A Marshall Plan for Mexico.”

The obvious problems, of course, is that so much of the money would likely end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the Mexican ruling class that it would have no effect on the immigration rate.

So, I proposed a mechanism to make the subsidy dependent upon Mexico cutting the number of border crossers:

“Mexico needs help if it`s ever to be a good neighbor to the U.S. Our political establishment`s plan for helping Mexico is to take even more unemployed Mexicans off Fox`s hands. The moral problem with this plan, among others, is that most of the burden of helping Mexico this way falls on those Americans least able to afford it.

“A better solution would be to put more of the burden of helping Mexico on American taxpayers. The progressive income tax means that the costs would fall more on the right half of the American bell curve, who can afford it, rather than on the left half.

“We should demand that Fox use his military to police his northern border regions against Mexicans trying to illegally enter America as vigorously as he`s doing on his southern border. In return for quantified cuts in illegal immigration from Mexico, we would offer a Marshall Plan-type arrangement to help Mexicans stay in Mexico. For example, we could offer Fox $4 for every $1 that private remittances from Mexicans resident in the US decline. So, if Fox helped cut the number of Mexican illegals in the US by enough that the amount of money wired home fell from $7 billion to $4 billion per year, we`d give him $12 billion. To us, that`s a pittance to pay annually to help solve a pressing social problem.”

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A Marshall Plan for Mexico


Here`s
a link to an account (The
Washington Times
, Aug. 13
) of how the Fox regime intends to
seal Mexico`s southern border against illegal
immigrants from Central America. I can`t help
excerpting some of the more amusingly ironic parts:

Mexican
authorities deported 150,000 Central Americans last
year and another 100,000 during the first six months
of 2001, with a notable increase in the number of
Salvadorans prompted by major earthquakes in January.
The head of the Mexican migration service, Felipe de
Jesus Preciado, said in an interview that he expected
the numbers to rise dramatically with the
implementation of Plan Sur, particularly when the
purge of corrupt elements begins to take root.

Mr.
Preciado said the motive for the southern crackdown
was a desire to deal with the problems created by
penniless migrants flowing north along routes also
used by drug traffickers and gun runners. "The
flow of Central American migrants north is a national
security problem for Mexico. It wouldn`t be such a big
problem if they were getting through to the U.S., but
they get stuck and they hang around in the frontier
cities making trouble, sleeping in the streets with no
money," he said.

It is an argument that
fails to satisfy migrants` rights groups, who have
lambasted Plan Sur as hypocritical, inhumane and
misguided. "The government`s search for
concessions for Mexican workers has gone hand in hand
with a tightening of the southern frontier," said
Blanca Villasenor of the Mexico-based group Sin
Fronteras (Without Borders). "In the south, the
Mexican authorities are now repeating the same
discourse as the United States." …

"Every
day, we are seeing the Mexican police getting more
rigid and pushing people to take more risky routes,
and this goes hand in hand with increases in
abuses," said Walter Arriaga from Casa Migrante,
a church-run support group in the Guatemalan border
city of Tecun Uman. "We will bring down the death
toll," Mr. Preciado said, referring primarily to
the widespread assaults against vulnerable migrants in
the south. "But if someone drowns in some river
because there is no other route, what can we do?"

This
got me to thinking about a novel solution for our
immigration problems and for President Fox`s domestic
problems.

Fox
seems a fine fellow, one who might actually believe
the Tony Blair Third Way rhetoric he espouses. (Oh,
you`ve read on the Wall Street Journal
editorial page that Fox is a conservative free
marketeer? Well, the WSJ`s
record on judging Mexican Presidents is a little
spotty
. Dow-Jones put the depraved former President
Carlos Salinas
on their Board of Directors just
before he had to flee to Ireland to avoid being
lynched by his erstwhile subjects. Fox told Britain`s
Daily Telegraph
he saw himself as
"center-left," and stated, "I would
more take Tony Blair`s philosophy of the Third Way
than the neo-liberal conservative position of
Thatcher.")

Yet,
by most accounts, Fox has made little progress toward
solving the fundamental problems that have plagued
Mexico for the last 480 years.

Eight
months into the Fox era, the Indians in Chiapas remain
in revolt. He can`t finance education and welfare
programs because the white upper class continues to
cheat massively on their income tax obligations.
Mexico is in recession and won`t come close to
creating the new jobs it needs to provide work to its
rapidly growing populations.

Not
surprisingly, with the home front so dire, Fox and his
Foreign
Minister Jorge G. Castañeda
have found it far more
enjoyable to spend much time in America shaking down
the U.S. government for benefits for Mexicans.

According
to Castañeda, Fox`s goal is to turn NAFTA into the
European Union. What he especially wants are the big
subsidies from America and Canada of the kind Germany
and France paid to poorer countries like Spain. Castañeda told the LA Times (8/12/2001),
"Somebody else has to build our highways."

Currently,
residents of the US send about $7 or 8 billion per
year back to Mexico as remittances. This is a huge
amount to Fox. To us, it is chump change, relative to
the costs imposed on America by Mexican illegal
immigration.

The
man needs money. America has money. Let`s make a deal.

Mexico
needs help if it`s ever to be a good neighbor to the
U.S. Our political establishment`s plan for helping
Mexico is to take even more unemployed Mexicans off
Fox`s hands. The moral problem with this plan, among
others, is that most of the burden of helping Mexico
this way falls on those Americans least able to afford
it.

A
better solution would be to put more of the burden of
helping Mexico on American taxpayers. The progressive
income tax means that the costs would fall more on the
right half of the American bell curve, who can afford
it, rather than on the left half.

We
should demand that Fox use his military to police his
northern border regions against Mexicans trying to
illegally enter America as vigorously as he`s doing on
his southern border. In return for quantified cuts in
illegal immigration from Mexico, we would offer a
Marshall Plan-type arrangement to help Mexicans stay
in Mexico. For example, we could offer Fox $4 for
every $1 that private remittances from Mexicans
resident in the US decline. So, if Fox helped cut the
number of Mexican illegals in the US by enough that
the amount of money wired home fell from $7 billion to
$4 billion per year, we`d give him $12 billion. To us,
that`s a pittance to pay annually to help solve a
pressing social problem.

In
the past, of course, a Marshall Plan for Mexico would
simply have been stolen. Perhaps it still would be,
but certainly the honesty level in Mexico is getting
higher now that politics have become more competitive.
Anyway, even if Mr. Fox wants Mexico`s Marshall Plan
money deposited in raw diamonds in a Swiss bank
account, we`d still benefit from his aid in reducing
illegal crossings.



[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and


movie critic
for


The American Conservative
.
His website


www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily
blog.]

September
03,
2001

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