In her column in the Wall Street Journal Mary Anastasia O’Grady reviews a plan which I think is the best way by far to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America:
The HUGE Business Council—an acronym for Honduras, U.S., Guatemala, El Salvador—aims to create one million jobs in the next three to five years by “near-shoring†supply chains that serve U.S. manufacturing. It also proposes to attract capital to build or rebuild things like roads, ports and airports and to bring U.S. natural gas to the region.
The council already includes some big players, including Parkdale, one of the world’s largest yarn manufacturers and apparel maker Intradeco.
The idea dovetails beautifully with the vision of a commercially interconnected Central America, Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast—via rail and shipping—laid out in a 2017 report on the Mexico-U.S. relationship from the Mexican Council for International Affairs.
Highlighting “investment in logistics and transport infrastructure,†the report called for “complete modernization†of a train line from Guatemala to the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula to open “a new frontier†with the eastern U.S. “It should also contemplate the extension of this train line to Tegucigalpa in Honduras.†The same rail lines could be used to lay fiber-optic cable.
What are the impediments to the plan?
These are private initiatives, but they need buy-in from government—and that’s a problem. U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle love to grandstand along the southern border, bemoaning the poverty and misery that sends desperate migrants north. But standing up to progressives who shape counterproductive U.S. foreign policy, and to labor unions that work at cross purposes with risk-taking capitalists, is another matter.
and, contrary to what you might infer from Ms. O’Grady’s column, the need for “buy-in from government” isn’t limited to the U. S. The governments of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador need to be enlisted as well which brings us to the core problem at the root of Central America’s economic woes: bad government. During the Cold War we tolerated and in many cases supported bad governments on the grounds that they were better than pro-Soviet communist governments but the Cold War has been over for 30 years now. Now we’re nervous about Bolivarianism. When will we learn that among the greatest risks we face are unfair, undemocratic, corrupt governments in Mexico and Central America?
If they’re convinced they have something to gain by them, elites in these countries will go along with such plans. The remedy for bad government isn’t more government or less government but better government and whatever we can do to encourage those among our closest neighbors, the better off we will be.
And if said elites work for or are one with the cartels,
the reason many young people say they leave, is it wise for the US to partner with the cartels as well?
There are other impediments I probably should have touched on in the post. For example, the history of U. S. corporate involvement in Mexico and Central America. Or the non-stop anti-U. S. propaganda. You raise another impediment which is organized crime (other than their governments which are in a class by themselves).
I want to infect Central America with conservative American values.
That’s why I want more green cards.
Come here, work, go back to visit and invest, come back again as often as you like.
I’d like to see more Americans vacation and retire there. That means security.
Security can be an opportunity for those with the “git r done†attitude.
These cartels will need to be given an offer that they can’t refuse.
Shouldn’t we deal with the bad governance in our own country first?
We’re getting the best government we collectively deserve.
It’s a political competition that has flaws but has a legal framework to minimize the results of those.
Our criminal and immigration courts system needs to be better funded to move faster so as to impress an expectation of enforcement on our new neighbors. Something they’re not accustomed to at home.
I just believe we’d be better off without a slum run by gangsters to our south. Beautiful country, wonderful people, corrupt government.