Every election has winners and losers, and Mexico's is no exception.  While the press is making much of Mexico's centrist PRI and center-right PAN parties being the big losers in last night's election of socialist Andrés Manuel López-Obrador in Mexico, the real loser is actually up north, in the U.S. Democratic Party.

Sounds strange until you look at the details.

After all the ideological compatibility between AMLO's new lefty MORENA party and the increasingly socialist U.S. Democrats seems to be identical.

Both favor heavy social spending, forced unionization of workers, political patronage, Chicago-style political muscle, and fealty to the ideals of the Socialist International.  It's what most socialists do until they run out of Other People's Money.

Democrats have staked their future on uneducated, needy illegals forming the base of their party's fortunes.  In Mexico, AMLO has done the same thing.  The problem comes because the Mexicans in question are the same people.

AMLO's social spending policies are likely to draw Mexicans illegally here in the U.S. back to Mexico.  If you have a choice of taking welfare benefits here or welfare benefits there, it's likely you'll go for them in your home country, where the language is the same, the Migra isn't out looking for you, and you know your way around the culture.  That's bad news for the Democrats, who rely on illegals to lard up their electoral college votes in blue states, increase federal spending based on head counts here, and actually vote illegally in elections, particularly in districts where very few people are in the country legally.

It goes to show that even with ideological conformity, nations have interests, and interests most certainly can conflict.

For many years, I had wondered why what passes for Mexico's conservatives always seemed to be so fiercely aligned to U.S. Democrats.  Why was former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Mexico's first elected conservative via the PAN party, always such a shill for Democrats?  Why was President Felipe Calderón, who came after him, almost as obnoxious?  Why did these people so advocate for an end to U.S. borders and denounce the American people as Nazis for opposing them, despite their being fairly conservative and ideologically recognizable on every other issue?

It turns out their political fortunes were built on getting as many indigent Mexicans out of the country as possible.  Their governments benefited from their absence, both from remittances and in the way they lowered social costs for the Mexican government in terms of housing them, educating them, and providing them with income and health care among other things.  For a conservative government focused on fiscal discipline, it was most certainly in their interest to drive as many of Mexico's poor to El Norte, the better to get the gringo to pay, an old Mexican custom dating from the war of 1848.

Democrats in the U.S., in turn, lapped up the new migrants, with California's Democratic gov. Jerry Brown announcing "you're all welcome here."  His party benefited, and the more, the better.  The Catholic bishops also benefited, hence Steve Bannon's admittedly harsh analysis that the Church was all in for illegals even as it claimed to believe in the rule of law, because of its interest in "filling the pews."

Now comes AMLO, whose big plan is to enact social welfare programs in Mexico, a move that is sure to draw many Mexicans back to their home country.  It makes sense from his point of view and the viewpoint of his national interest, given that Mexico can no longer afford to lose people.  Demographically, the median age is rising there, the population growth has gone flat, and incomes have passed the $7,000-a-year threshold, below which is said to trigger illegal immigration.

Nations always have interests, and this one conflicts with the U.S. Democratic Party's interest, which, up until now, aligned with the interests of Mexico's conservatives.

AMLO, if you look carefully at his words, seems cognizant of Democrats recognizing this and maybe getting angry about it, thus he has offered up to his ideological coevals in the States the "human right" of illegal immigration to the U.S. as a sop, using other people's countries instead of his own.  Here are his words:

Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared mass immigration to the United States a "human right" for all North Americans during a speech Tuesday.

"And soon, very soon – after the victory of our movement – we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world," Obrador said, adding that immigrants "must leave their towns and find a life in the United States."

He then declared migration "a human right we will defend," eluniversal.com reports.

What we are looking at here is a bid to ship illegals from other countries through Mexico to the U.S. (to keep Democrats happy), while implicitly discouraging Mexican illegal immigration, which has drained the country of talent.  There is no other explanation for such a policy.  Turning Mexico into a road stop for illegals from Central America and elsewhere by calling it a "human right" is frankly toxic for Mexico, because it will empower cartels and give Mexico's government nothing, not even remittances, and plenty of enmity with the U.S.  What's more, it should serve as an electoral mobilizer for Republicans, who will be angry at the move.

Net effect: another loss for Democrats, in terms of lost people it intended to build its party fortunes on and in energizing Republicans.  They're not going to like this.