Thread: Mexico Isn't a Failed State - Yet

Mark Krikorian
NRO Contributor
March 24, 2009 4:00 AM

Mexico Isn’t a Failed State — Yet
But we need to protect ourselves now.

By Mark Krikorian

Mexico is in trouble. The drug wars there have claimed more than 7,000 lives since President Calderón took office in late 2007. Police are being beheaded, politicians are being assassinated, and pundits are talking of Mexico’s becoming a “failed state.â€

How big could such a refugee crisis be? Estimates of the number of people who fled to the United States during the chaos of 1910–1920 range as high as 10 percent of the population; the equivalent today would be more than 10 million people. And that was at a time when the population of the six Mexican states that border on the U.S. accounted for only about 10 percent of Mexico’s total population, compared to nearly 20 percent today. Even if only 5 percent of Mexico’s people fled northward, that would amount to 5 million refugees, more than all Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, who have come over the past decade, and they would arrive all at once and mostly concentrate in the immediate vicinity of the border.

I think they are already here...and then some!