Thread: The United States should be supporting border infrastructure

While I support Brewer and hope to be out in the streets here tomorrow doing that face to face I support US federal financing of Mexican border infrastructure.

There are Americans living in Arizona and their need for transportation, electricity, fresh water and sewage treatment is just as real as anyone else's. Improving their infrastructure inevitably means cooperating with the neighboring Mexican state to the south.

Sharron Angle in Reno probably wants a good highway to Las Vegas and Henderson. The highway from Reno to Las Vegas would then connect with the one that Las Vegans use to get to Phoenix. The highway there goes south and connects with Tucson and Nogales.

There are proposals for massive photovoltaic solar electric generation east of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora. The Mexican region is also very rich in geothermal resources. This will help the local economy in Sonora and there are plans for an exchange with Yuma. This increases the sizo of the market and lowers cost.

There are plans for using a lot of the electricity for massive desalination in Sonora and even larger in Baja California near Mexicali this will also ease water shortage in Southern California. With more water available the part of the Colorado Delta which revived with accidental receipt of Arizona agricultural wastewater can stay green. It will also help protect the Sacramento Delta from Southern California water demand.

Nogales is on two sides of the border yet the sewage of both sides is processed here in Nogales, Arizona and would rise without the two third
of the sewage processed coming from Mexico.

The majority of Mexican immigrants come from a region north and west of Mexico City called the Bajio. The fastest growing areas within Mexico*
are the secondary cities. More of the Mexican immigrants in an ideal world would have stayed where they are from or moved to the secondary cities in that country. The other thing which I see is having the economy improve in Nogales, Sonora and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora would provide an attractive economic option for the "repatriating Mexicans" known around here as illegal aliens leaving Arizona.

*For a while Mexicos fastest growing areas were the border communities but there are limitations on infrastructure there limiting growth without major project financing for expansion.

We have always done many things with Mexico because they benefit from our efforts to protect our citizens. Water and sewage especially, do not recognize borders and so we have many projects on the Mexican side of the border for decades - that is why they are spoiled and think we are eternally wealthy enough to carry on. We even have water projects for their use here near the middle of the state. When will they grow up, chin up, pull up their boot straps or whatever the term is and do the right thing by themselves and be good neighbors?

Personally I think it should all be suspended until this border problem is resolved.

Ninety five per cent of Colorado River water no longer makes it all the way to the Sea of Cortez. There are large areas of sun baked clay which used to be marshland with reeds birds and fishes due to our policies which have minimized sharing.

Both infrastructure improvement and tighter enforcement should be done at the same time.

Originally Posted by sarum

We have always done many things with Mexico because they benefit from our efforts to protect our citizens. Water and sewage especially, do not recognize borders and so we have many projects on the Mexican side of the border for decades - that is why they are spoiled and think we are eternally wealthy enough to carry on. We even have water projects for their use here near the middle of the state. When will they grow up, chin up, pull up their boot straps or whatever the term is and do the right thing by themselves and be good neighbors?

Personally I think it should all be suspended until this border problem is resolved.

It is a cultural thing in Mexico. You are either a predator or prey. That kind of mentality doesnt fly well here. Not to mention the racism and nationalism that is taught in Mexico which makes them incompatable in many instances as multicultural citizens.

Maybe we could afford to continue on infrastructure if we weren't paying for so many illegal aliens and unemployed citizens.

We have lost many wild things on the U.S. side too - like the native salmon of that region.

Little Done About Border Sewage Spill (Mexico/US)
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-205455.html

Perhaps the above story illustrates why U.S. citizen taxpayer/voters display real trepidation to signing onto major civil "infrastructure projects" with Mexico.


Richard,

And despite our government's enthusiasm throughout both recent Republican and Democratic administrations toward U.S. military (and now, civilian police) cooperation with Mexico, the primary results of such U.S. taxpayer-funded projects seems to have been to bring both greatly increased and highly sophisticated arms to which they otherwise would not have had access to powerful Mexican drug cartels, plus increasing evidence of Mexican government-style corruption within our own Border Patrol along our International Border with that country. Tragically for the Mexican people, financial bribery is an historically institutionalized way of life in their country, in addition to a traditional "means of governing" among their upper classes, which refuse to tax themselves as we do in order to bring needed social benefits to less fortunate Mexican citizens.

In addition, many Mexican military personnel once trained at both Mexican and U.S. taxpayer expense to combat these drug cartels simply were bribed by the promise of higher pay to become bodyguards and "spies" for the drug lords themselves after they completed their training, and now are using their military, and, I presume, English, skills to
give these career criminals "another edge" in their objective to extend their considerable ruthless influence beyond Mexico into the United States. These people, Richard, do not wish to "build bridges, not walls": they want to buy up ranch land along the Mexico/U.S. border as they have throughout Mexico in order to establish bases to run their illegal drug and human trafficking operations as far from the "arm of professional law enforcement" as possible, and to locate closer to isolated U.S. federal and state parks, where they already have established sophisticated and large-scale marijuana growing operations.

U.S. taxpayers (the majority of whom do not use drugs) already are spending huge amounts of money to finance an increased military operation in Afganistan, a nation historically and still effectively controlled by tribal overlords whose primary interest is keeping their rural population 1) in terror of them; and 2) employed growing poppies,since this one illegal drugs-producing crop yields far greater profits than the wheat, barley, or any other agricultural crop formerly grown by Afgan farmers. Why do you feel that such expenditure of U.S. domestic income should be extended to Mexico, where, as in Afganistan, powerful but unprincipled private individuals also involved in the wealthy international drug trade, exert an influence in running national affairs which our own Founders bent every effort to prevent in writing our own Constitution and established the laws of goverance for our nation?

It a disillusioning but historically real fact that the primary reason that it was so difficult to ban the human slavery trade by Western European nations to so many within the Western Hemisphere even very late in the 19th Century simply was because it was so profitable. It took 50 years after their Parliament declared engaging in slave trading and/or the tranport of human slaves on British ships illegal for that nation to finally bring an end to it among its own subjects. The unfotunate reality is that illegal drugs and human trafficking for the purpose of cheap, unsupervised labor (often for use in constuction) is big business internationally now, and I do not think it is fair to keep trying to throw responsiblity for having to rectify this situation upon the backs of ordinary people who--like in the trans-Atlantic slave trade before--themselves neither engage in nor profit from it.

Texas2step