The Real Solution To The Immigration Problem

[rexanglorum]

It has been understood that poverty causes most people to emigrate from Latin America. No two countries sharing a land border have such dramatic differences in GDP per capita as do the US and Mexico. When the average unskilled Mexican worker can make six times as much because he crosses an imaginary line, it would take sheer brutality to physically stop the flow of people. The magnitude of the brutality would be acceptable to almost all Americans. Accommodation and Liberalization are a better way forward but in a society that has a fairly large set of public goods, it becomes costly to have millions of low wage earners coming here (even if the net economic gains are positive).

Ultimately, Mexico's economy must improve. It would be violent and costly to invade and occupy and "nation build" Mexico, not to mention unethical and imperialistic. A much more peaceful alternative exists and here are the steps:

- Legalize all narcotics in the US, take away the black market. In addition, liberalize immigration, if you want to come here you can and establish a "line" (currently, poor people with no relatives in the US more or less have no "line) and make the line move at a brisk pace and through a few designated areas. Th at way drug traffickers and human traffickers virtually vanish and the ranchers in Arizona do not bear the brunt of human migration through their property.

- Tell the Mexican drug lords and local toughs who live in the North and down the Coasts that since they cannot make any more money selling drugs, that they can have new opportunity. There job would be to allow Americans (and other non Mexicans), who wish to move to and conduct business in Mexico, to have American property rights. Currently, Americans can only lease land in Mexico and that means that for a large enough bribe and businesses can be taken over on a judge's orders. This means that very little American business is done in Mexico. By bringing assurances of property rights to Mexico, people from more affluent countries would jump at the chance to invest and move there and to employee people there.

- The former drug lords and gangsters would keep the Federal government of Mexico off of the back of productive people and enterprises in a given area. In exchange those guys would get a flat percentage of the revenues generated by foreigners. That means that they have an incentive to be accommodating and business friendly.

- With Americans, American money and American know how, we would soon see levels of productivity and wages that look more like American productivity and wages. The influx of Americans would raise the standard of ordinary Mexican people very quickly and very dramatically. Conversely, Americans, especially young people like us would have new and opportunities. Americans moving to Mexico can find real opportunities. Baja California for instances, would be like California in terms of weather, levels of education and culture but without burdensome regulations and high taxes. Entrepenuers would thrive and people in our generation could get real jobs as opposed to crappy temp jobs in medical billing or working for the government. Real wealth would be created.

- People in our generation would know the dignity of owning a home and being able to handle the mortgage payments. Imagine large homes, near the beach, currounded by palmtress and instead of it costing seven figures it would cost under six figures. Imagine it Californians, being able to own your home outright by the age of 45 and before than having s mortage payments that does not eat up the better half of your paychecks.

- In order to be one of these pioneers you would have to fit a few criteria, you would have to have a clean criminal record, have at least some liquid cash on hand (say $10,000) and you would have to be at least competent if not conversational or fluent in Spanish. This would the creation of an Anglo-Hispanic cultural and economic zone. This would be a respectful and peaceful means of satisfyin gall parties involved, the only losers would be the entrenched political elites in Mexico city, who never had control of the entire country anyway.

- Jump forward a generation or two and Baja California looks like California, the deserts of the Northwest bloom with cities that are like Phoenix and Albuquerque and the areas along the Rio Grande would be just as productive as it would be on the Texas side. Mexicans can easily visit family in the US or in Mexico or in these special economic zones. The children of Americans would be fully bilingual, Mexicans and Anglo would intermarry, with higher standards of living Mexican school children can stay in school through high school or college. Eventually, there could be votes about making each each area into its own country or joining the US or staying a province in Mexico but it would be based on the will of the people in that area. 


This plan of action is far and away better than building a fence or simply importing poverty while allowing Mexico to be a place that is able to export so much of it.



Cliffs: Make Mexican Organized crime into an ally by legalizing drugs  and drying up the black market, Let the Mexican gangsters (folks who are more upstanding than almost any Mexcan government official) who control various parts of Mexico (especially Baja and the border states and the coast down to Sinaloa), provide protection for Americans and American businesses and let them make their living by taking an agreed upon tax. Americans wishing to come to Mexico and enjoy this jointly provided protection by the US government and local Mexican strongmen, would have to have some cash, education, clean record and speak Spanish. We are sending Mexico good people and not turning their country in some colonial dumping ground.

Americans would have opportunities and the Mexicans living these special economic zones would mutually benefits and the need to illegally immigrate into the US and to leave you home would be gone. Young Americans would be able to afford homes, have their own businesses and once you get a young man out of his mom's house and some deeming temp job, he will marry (in many cases with local Mexican women) and produce Anglo-hispanic babies. Over time we create an Anglo-Hispanic society that makes us all more comfortable, more happy and more hope full.





What do you think of this NT?

 

[moneyisthemotive]

All drugs will never be legalized ...

 

[teamjordan79]

i say we just need to let them (latin america & the rest of the world) be and let them rule themselves. Stop interfering in their policies, govt, economy (IMF, World Bank etc.)
the arizona law is attempting to treat the symptoms of globalization
I say we tackle the problem at its root.....actually improve their standard of living and economies...then they would not have a reason to immigrate.

 

[ac4three]

It's way too late for me to read all of that...

 

[rexanglorum]

TeamJordan79 wrote:

---

i say we just need to let them (latin america & the rest of the world) be and let them rule themselves. Stop interfering in their policies, govt, economy (IMF, World Bank etc.)
the arizona law is attempting to treat the symptoms of globalization
I say we tackle the problem at its root.....actually improve their standard of living and economies...then they would not have a reason to immigrate.


I agree that the root of the problem is the poverty in Latin America. However, reforming or abolishing the IMF an World Bank will not create prosperity in Latin America or in other poor countries. While the IMF and World Bank have done more hard than good for the Third World, there poverty stems from a deeper and more fundamental cause. The lack of property rights is at the bottom of virtual every poor country's problems.

Without property rights and government that is bound by law, no one wants to invest in very much in that country. While the term capitalism is a dirty word for some, capital (the means of production) combined with labor and time create productivity. Productivity is a dirty word as well (usually by people who do not understand it all) but productivity is what creates wealth and creates a higher standard living, higher real wages and the ability further grow and your capital stock and further improve your quality of life in the future.

The patterns in global economic history are very clear, rule of law and property rights bring up standards of living and societies that cannot provide those things stay poor or they become poor (since the default human condition is abject poverty, most countries have always been poor and have failed to change that fact bu ta few such as Argentina have had serious backslides. The voters in American, Canada, Australia, Britain, Europe and Japanese should understand that an advanced economy can indeed fall into serious poverty if its government undermines property rights and rule of law sufficiently).






  

 

[in yo nostril]

go ahead and explain how you are going to regulate drug sales.

and great idea giving mexican cartel leaders any kind of important responsibility. they'll kill anyone for any reason but you want to empower them in a reasonable way. im sure they will gladly put their monetary gains aside to go along with the plan.

 

[mrshadow]

Yo can I get cliff notes of the cliff notes?

 

[bostonthreeparty]

just no amnesty to people who have crossed over. it will just cause thousands upon thousands more to enter america, causing even more chaos

 

[rexanglorum]

Originally Posted by In Yo Nostril

go ahead and explain how you are going to regulate drug sales.

and great idea giving mexican cartel leaders any kind of important responsibility. they'll kill anyone for any reason but you want to empower them in a reasonable way. im sure they will gladly put their monetary gains aside to go along with the plan.

Well you could sell drugs like how liquor is sold in many states. You would have to go to some boring, depressing place off of the interstate and buy the product in brown paper bags. I am guessing that your next question will be something like "so you would legalize meth, heroin and mushrooms" (non drug users always include mushrooms in that unholy trinity because it must sound very scary or something). My answer is that yes, they should be legal and once legal all of the drugs will be dirt cheap like cigarettes or cheap bear or coffee.

As far as giving the drug lords responsibility, the majority of these business men were born into peasant families. They often times grew up without running water, electricity or the means to afford meat, beer or even soda on their family's table. These are people who started with nothing and had no opportunities in what the elites arbitraily define as 'legitimate business" like becoming the CEO of goldman Sachs (maybe if those peasants saved for a thousand years and pooled their money they could send a kid from their village to Harvard Business School in 3010), Governor of Illinois or even a police officer (and collecting bribes from gringo tourists) or other civil servants (like the being head of the state owned oil company Pemex and taking in kick backs.

Their only options are back breaking manual labor with no ability to better your life, back breaking toil as an illegal immigrant in the US (and having a little money but being poor by the standards of the US) or making real money and selling narcotics. They did so and honestly the life stories of Mexican who come up become wealthy are much more inspiring then almost any "poor" kid in the US who rose up to become a politician. Politicians do not produce a dime of wealth, they live by taxation (as opposed to giving people why they actually want and are willing to pay for) and if you were born in the US, even if your family was on food stamps, you were born on third base compared the condition of many Mexican folks.

Because drug dealing operates outside of the law, theft and fraud usually are prevented by the threat of violence and wrongs are punished by violent private venegence. These businessman have to do it in order to transport and sell their product to the millions of willing consumers in the US. Like soldiers i na war, they have job to do, they have enemies and unlike the officially sanctioned militaries of the world, they finance themselves instead of using taxation like governments do. Obviously some drug lords should not be trusted with the role of protector of American property rights in a region. Some drug lords are unstable and enjoy violence, those guys would have to go.

Most of these Mexican businessmen, however, are you like you, me and most human beings on this planet. They want decent food, clothing, shelter, the ability to provide for their families and the dignity that comes from not being on the bottom economic rung of society. Most of them, knowing that drugs will no longer pay, would happily accept their new roles because they would be getting money coming and would be able to keep on being able to be the wealthy padrino who is able to help his relatives financially, just like any private equity manager in Connecticut or like any Investment banker in Tokyo wants, to be able to be comfortable and able to make life comfortable for his loved ones.

Unlike many self proclaimed power players of high finance, these guys would get paid for actual performance because they would get a percentage of the tax that they could charge so they have an incentive to provide stability, safety, law, property rights and civil liberties because failure to do would result in very little investment in their zone of protection and therefore less money for themselves. The more money and investment they can bring into their zone would mean more that they could tax. I other words, the incentives would be very well arranged.

 

[in yo nostril]

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

Originally Posted by In Yo Nostril

go ahead and explain how you are going to regulate drug sales.

and great idea giving mexican cartel leaders any kind of important responsibility. they'll kill anyone for any reason but you want to empower them in a reasonable way. im sure they will gladly put their monetary gains aside to go along with the plan.

Most of them, knowing that drugs will no longer pay, would happily accept their new roles because they would be getting money coming and would be able to keep on being able to be the wealthy padrino who is able to help his relatives financially, just like any private equity manager in Connecticut or like any Investment banker in Tokyo wants, to be able to be comfortable and able to make life comfortable for his loved ones.

absolutely not. its lawless down there in certain areas they control and you think they will drop everything without force to go along with this? they are making piles of money and arent just going to happily accept anything.

 

[tacc4]

Originally Posted by TeamJordan79

i say we just need to let them be and let them rule themselves... I say we tackle the problem at its root.....actually improve their standard of living and economies

Huh? How are we going to improve the standard of living in Mexico if we just let them be?
Lets focus on OP's ideas, which actually made sense. Off the top of my head I found it ironic that your plan involved Americans knowing Spanish in order to get into Mexico, but Mexicans just had to get in line to get into the U.S. The problem w/that is partially ideological, but also practical. In the short term, I think this does a lot of harm to the economies of the American southwest. I say that because there would be a huge influx of Mexicans into California and Texas, specifically, and virtually no labor market. On the Mexican side of the border, I think Americans would be hesitant to move their businesses, at least initially. So in the short term, American unemployment would spike and the majority of American businesses in Mexico would probably be related to the tourism industry. Perhaps the legalization and taxation of marijuana (no way you can legalize cocaine) is enough to overcome the financial burden of mass emigration, but we've got a lot of debt floating around and it would be nice to use that new-found money to cut down our interest payments.

In the medium-to-long term I see the possibility for an ironic twist. If the language barrier is dropped - realistically, the market is going to dictate how much Spanish is necessary and a business owner who goes to Mexico once a month doesn't need to know Spanish, as long as his employees are fluent - then we may end up with a shortage of skilled workers in Mexico and a dramatic improvement in the standard of living for most Mexicans. From my perspective that would be the most effective fix for the immigration "problem" - incentive to live and work in Mexico. American entrepreneurs would quickly swoop in on industries like telecom, internet, construction, banking and public services, like expanding the freeway system, power and water grid, etc. With American businesses being moved across the border, wealth will be generated for business owners and employees of those businesses (largely Mexicans, in all likelihood). Meanwhile, the possibility exists that some of that wealth would make its way back into the United States, where it can be put to use by employing some of the immigrants. Would be quite ironic if Mexicans came to the U.S. to improve their standard of living and those who didn't emigrate found themselves three or four times more wealthy than their counterparts in the U.S.

That transition phase is difficult to quantify, in terms of duration and contingencies, but I would imagine it would take a good 2-3 years, at least. Once you're over that hurdle, I definitely believe there would be some benefits to this plan. From a political standpoint, its tough to support something that takes more than a year to produce results, especially if the initial results are painful for middle-America. This would have to be done with the promise that marijuana would be legalized (gives hippies a reason to re-elect their politicians and farmers another crop to plant. Also alleviates some of the labor surplus) for the foreseeable future and taxpayers would receive some sort of benefit from its legalization and taxation. My other concern would be the bastardization of Mexico. If you've got an American bank that wants to build a branch or high-rise in Mexico, I would imagine that they would contract the work out to an American firm. I just don't like the idea of American businesses working exclusively with other American firms when they're in Mexico. Sure, the majority of the employees would be Mexicans but the majority of the money would go back in to the U.S. (granted this would be after the Mexican government took its share of taxes). I would hate to see a plan like this executed flawlessly from an economic standpoint, if it came at the expense of the Mexican culture. All-in-all, a very thoughtful plan and one that I would like to see you expand a little bit more on. To hell with Cliffs Notes; if something makes sense, people should be willing to read it.

 

[tacc4]

I think the idea of having narcotics dealers serve as security for American firms is actually a pretty good idea. That puts a pretty huge burden on the legal system, though. An American business owner has to know that he can move/start his operation in Mexico, feel safe about not having his property vandalized/burglarized, take comfort in knowing that he won't be extorted by his former drug dealer-turned-security chief and believe that other businesses are operating under the same set of rules. And all of this has to be supported by the Mexican government and Mexican population.

 

[the pga tour]

Bold ideas, but the legaliziation of such hard drugs would be disaterous. I don't have much of a counterpoint to solve the problem but I know that your solution would not work, and I would be terrified if it ever did come to fruition.

 

[theabove]

Interesting read.

Used a bit of your Healthcare thread for better learning lol

Rex, you study Economics and go on to do a PhD?

 

[outbackbob24]

Help me understand though. what would the American firms need protection against?

 

[thizzle wigle]

stoped reading when you said that making drugs legal would put drug lords out of the job. how would that happen?


stupid imo

 

[b smooth 202]

We're a ways away from drug reform...especially when the government of the United States and Mexico are working together together in the "War on Drugs" to increase the militarization of the political sphere.

Also how do you fix a country whose natural resources have been stripped and thus forced into economic dependency?

It's not mere coincidence poverty is so prevalent where it is.

Huh? How are we going to improve the standard of living in Mexico if we just let them be?

How is it OUR responsibility to improve their country?

I don't understand why people think in such a manner. Especially when our standard of improving other countries is subjugating their culture for American ideologies.

 

[tacc4]

Originally Posted by THIZZLE WIGLE

stoped reading when you said that making drugs legal would put drug lords out of the job. how would that happen?


stupid imo

You could buy drugs at WalMart legally or you can buy drugs on the street illegally - seems like an obvious blow to a drug lord's operation. Its no different than the way bootleggers were put out of business after the 18th amendment was repealed. C'mon, this is really basic information. Where do you go to buy your Keystone? You meeting some guy in an alley where he pops the hatchback on his '93 Sable and lets you sift through his fresh imports? Or you making a stop at 7-Eleven like everyone else?

 

[jd214]

Let immigrants come in, but they have to pay a fine.

And legalize all drugs.

 

[BANLEU]

smh the problems that illegal immigrants cause in this country are far greater than the problems that legalizing drugs would. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to try to eliminate one problem by increasing another. Smh x2 if you think drug lords are going to give up their ways just because there is a legal way for them to profit. Ultimately they're just going to find some other illegal way to make more money.

 

[swizzc]

Originally Posted by THIZZLE WIGLE

stoped reading when you said that making drugs legal would put drug lords out of the job. how would that happen?


stupid imo

............. What? You must be dense.

 

[frische produkte]

Originally Posted by THIZZLE WIGLE

stoped reading when you said that making drugs legal would put drug lords out of the job. how would that happen?


stupid imo

[color= rgb(255, 0, 0)]Are you kidding me? Did you not learn anything about Prohibition in the 20's?! You don't see how people make huge sums of money off of illegal enterprises?[/color]

[color= rgb(255, 0, 0)]I swear the common sense level on this board declines by the month.  [/color]

 

[swizzc]

Originally Posted by outbackbob24

Help me understand though. what would the American firms need protection against?

The Mexican Government... as Rex pointed out.

"Currently, Americans can only lease land in Mexico and that means thatfor a large enough bribe and businesses can be taken over on a judge'sorders." (The Mexican government is corrupt and could be bribed into eliminating American businesses that were set up and established in Mexico).
"This means that very little American business is done inMexico." (Obviously... Why start a business in Mexico when you aren't 100% sure there won't be a hostile takeover of your company by the Mexican government).
"By bringing assurances of property rights to Mexico, peoplefrom more affluent countries would jump at the chance to invest andmove there and to employee people there." (Also true, because Mexico is a largely untapped market in terms of American businesses for the reasons Rex explained above, but has the potential to be very lucrative).

 

[the yes guy]

I want to live in this utopian libertarian dreamworld as much as the next guy, but come on man. The world isn't a textbook.

 

[mr delorean]

welcome back to reality. we cant fix mexicos problem, and we shouldnt kill our standard of living to attempt to do so. the way to fix illegal immigration is nail employers of illegals with back breaking fines. no fences needed, the problem will be solved virtually over night. of course, this will never happen because all politicians are in someones pocket. democrats are too busy breeding a new voting constituency, and republicans are exploiting slave labor for profit margin.