MEXICO'S PLAN PUTS AMERICAN VALUES TO THE TEST

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MEXICO'S PLAN PUTS AMERICAN VALUES TO THE TEST
By Georgie Anne Geyer
Mon Apr 3, 6:01 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- Behind the illegal immigrants waving Mexican and Salvadoran flags in Los Angeles last week; behind the Mexican girl in Arlington, Va., who was quoted as saying on radio, "Citizens -- what are they for? We do all the work"; behind the antiquated calls for taking back the Southwest in the name of a Mexican Aztlan -- there is a plan.

I am not saying that this plan, propagated by Mexico City, could challenge the lies, secrecy and Machiavellian scheming of American war plans in the Middle East. I am not saying that the Mexican Foreign Ministry, with its offshoot the Institute of Mexicans Abroad, is directing an "invasion" of the United States.

But what is happening with illegals in America -- the riots, the refusal to become American while demanding all the rights of committed citizens, the desperate hanging on to "Mexicanness" -- is not accidental. It is the result of careful and cynical plans on the part of the Mexican government to develop its own constituency inside American society -- and to keep it forever Mexican.

This is the untold story. Congress debates (and decries, and derides and debates some more) how to assimilate illegals, most of them Mexican. But the vast majority of Mexican immigrants won't ever become Americans in their hearts because their government goes with them wherever they go. There are now upward of 45 Mexican consulates in the U.S. that keep immigrants demanding ever more welfare and privileges of "El Norte." Immigrants are used as a political wedge to demand more guest worker programs of Washington and to fight border control in the name of some utopian (but unworkable and dangerous) open-borders plan for all of North America.

The Mexican illegals in America are calling it a "new civil rights movement." But whereas America's civil rights movement was fought for freedom for unjustly treated Americans, this movement is one of more dependency on El Norte and of a refusal to develop Mexican society economically so it can be independent and self-actualizing.

Let me explain.

In 1995, I was in Mexico City interviewing two accomplished Mexican diplomats, one of them being Ambassador Alejandro Carrillo Castro, who had been Mexico's consul general in Chicago. He had put forth the idea of "dual citizenship" for Mexicans in the United States. The State Department encouraged it, and the new age was born. No longer did Mexican immigrants have to choose -- and thus began the development of the plan.

When in Mexico again last November, I saw the next steps. I dropped in at the Foreign Ministry to see Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, head of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad. He told me: "The basic concept is that the Mexican nation goes beyond the borders that contain Mexico. You can feel part of our nation without being on our territory.

"For the first time, we are exporting our politics. Many Mexicans now live 'transnational' lives, with one foot in our country and one foot in the other. This contributes to everyone's well-being."

Soon, Mexican candidates were traveling to Los Angeles to run for Mexican positions. Among the dual citizens there, they were asking the immigrants to influence their families "back home." At the same time, the passage of NAFTA bred more outward-looking attitudes. And a new breed of consuls with a different profile, highly politicized, were suddenly found across the United States. Mexicans in America could now "force anti-immigrant American politicians to pay a price," Gonzales continued.

Proof that these Mexican efforts were carefully and often cynically calculated according to American sensitivities was shown in the institute's hesitation to have Mexican citizens seen in voting lines -- in America -- voting for Mexican candidates.

"My most serious concern was to open the ballot boxes in Pilsen in Chicago and have lines of people voting for Mexican politicians," Gonzales remarked seriously. "The advantage of the system we set up -- Mexicans voting through the mail -- is that it goes under the political radar."

In short, what we have is a new ethnic-political situation totally unlike anything in America's past, except perhaps the 1920s German Bund and the present-day Israeli lobby. Both made and make strong political demands on their American members in the name of "the old country." Other national groups represented in America -- Polish, Lithuanian, British, French, etc. -- are more cultural organizations.

But with the Mexican immigrants, it is ineffably more difficult. Their homeland is often only an hour or two hours' flight away, and of course they can simply walk across the border. Their homeland hangs onto them. Still another dramatic example: Mexican President Vicente Fox recently put ads in American papers asserting Mexico should "participate in the design, management, supervision and evaluation" of any American guest worker program.

Meanwhile, to the shame that will follow Fox through history, in his five years as president he has done nothing to free up the economy, to create jobs and to break down the strangling class system of his country. Today, for instance, oil revenues account for some $28 billion a year, and remittances from Mexicans overseas are $20 billion. Dependency on oil, dependency on exporting their surplus people: a sad story.

It might be only that, except that 44.6 percent of Los Angeles is now Hispanic (second in real numbers only to Mexico City), and whites will soon number only 31 percent. Within 50 years Latinos will outnumber whites.

What will be the results of this unprecedented Mexican program of brazenly reaching into another country and telling it what to do? Will Mexicans simply retake the southern U.S.? Or will we perhaps come too late to the realization that in our foolishness, we have helped start the breakup of America?