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Annex Mexico?


• April 10, 2006 | 8:04 PM ET

One difference between the demonstrations in France and the demonstrations in America: The French are demonstrating for the right not to work hard, while the demonstrators in America mostly want to work.

And most of them, I think, really want that. Yes, there are loonies -- more than the standard Big Media treatment would have you believe -- who think that the Southwestern United States should go back to Mexico. But I suspect that most illegal immigrants don't want that. If they wanted to live in Mexico, they'd have stayed in Mexico.

In fact, they're leaving Mexico because its corrupt and thuggish political culture stifles economic growth and opportunity. The people there are smart and hardworking, after all, and they tend to do just fine when they get here. They're leaving because being smart and hardworking is enough to get you ahead in the United States, but not in Mexico. And I suspect that if the Reconquista advocates somehow did get their way, and the Southwest United States became a new Northern Mexico, we'd soon have illegal immigrants crossing over into Kansas and Oklahoma for opportunity, because the Mexican political culture would have ruined things in Arizona and Texas just like it's already ruined them further south.

So maybe we've been thinking about this the wrong way. Instead of worrying about Mexicans invading America, maybe what we need is for the United States to annex Mexico.

Oh, we don't need to turn Mexico into a state, or several. At least not right away. But as part of any immigration deal, the United States needs to demand reform in Mexico. Serious political reform, and serious economic reform.

And reciprocity. If we're going to make it easy for Mexicans to come to the United States to live, work, hold property, and get public benefits without too much paperwork trouble, we need to make it easy for Americans to do the same in Mexico. Right now, as several people have noticed, the environment there is considerably less friendly to foreigners than America's is.

But as the Mexican government has been free to express opinions about how the United States should set immigration, economic, and educational policy, it seems only fair if we do the same for them.

It's an interdependent world, after all. And that works both ways.