PrintBiden is wrecking a key bilateral relationship
With all eyes on Ukraine, few are noticing how Joe Biden is ruining relations with a critical nation next door to us, which is Mexico.
Title 42, which permits the U.S. to reject phony asylum-seekers on COVID concerns, was halted by a federal judge yesterday, but it's a temporary halt, so it may return soon. Whether the Biden administration obeys that order is anyone's guess. There are other judicial orders it's simply ignored as it carried on its open borders policy.
It doesn't matter to Joe Biden that his fellow Democrats — at least eight of them — are warning against this change of policy. It also doesn't matter to Biden that, as polls indicate, the public is against it. Bad as all of that is, he'll get the consequences he deserves come November.
But there's also Mexico, which is pretty unhappy about it, and the consequences, which don't have the steam valve of elections, might just be worse.
Here's Reuters from a few days ago:
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — Mexican officials are concerned the repeal of a measure adopted under the Trump administration to tighten the U.S. border will encourage a spike in migration and more profits for criminal gangs unless Washington does more to help mitigate the impact.
The United States has said it will on May 23 end the so-called Title 42 order issued during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 that has effectively shut down the U.S. asylum system at its shared 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
Title 42 has allowed U.S. authorities to quickly expel migrants to Mexico, and its removal risks pushing the record number of migrants attempting to enter the United States higher still, officials and politicians said.
"The flow of migrants we have now is already out of control," said Rosa Maria Gonzalez, a lawmaker from Mexico's center-right opposition National Action Party who represents the northern border state of Tamaulipas and heads the lower house of Congress migration committee.
Now, we know that Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a socialist known as "AMLO," is not beyond "schooling" Joe Biden about the significance of his country as a conduit for mass illegal immigration. Last September, AMLO released 15,000 illegal-alien Haitians from a holding pen in southern Mexico to Del Rio, Texas, where they massed under a bridge in a classic third-world hell-hole scenario. I wrote about that here:
The Center for Immigration Studies, sent a senior researcher named Todd Bensman to ask those questions on the ground, going to the immigrants themselves, and he came up with a doozy of an answer:
The surprising answer, which the migrants provided independently in different places and at different times, was universal: on Sunday, September 12, the Mexican government effectively sent a mass of migrants it had bottled up for months in its southern states up to the American border. This move, which appears to have been done under the cover of Mexico's independence week of celebration known as El Grito, essentially foisted a humanitarian problem onto the Americans in a single week.
Mexico was the one who did it. Turns out Joe Biden promised them some things and based on the available information, apparently never delivered.
Biden responded not by placating Mexico, but by starting night flights to spirit illegal migrants across the country, to prevent more damning camera shots of massed humanity from Fox News. To him, it was a public relations problem, not a warning from Mexico. He didn't do a thing to help Mexico.
But it's pretty clear that Biden's dinner triangle to migrants of all countries to come on in through the Mexican border isn't a welcome thing in Mexico.
The dynamics are pretty simple: mass migration means huge smuggling earnings for Mexico's notorious cartels. Because the U.S. won't guard its own border, cartels have stepped in from the Mexican side and declared that they now control the border. Anyone who wants to cross into the States will have to pay the $1,000 or more for the "fee" to enter.
Needless to say, a wall would stop that entire dynamic right there. But Biden has stopped construction of the wall. So the migrants come in; the fees get paid; and the cartels get very, very rich.
Like all large drug-dealing organizations, the cartels seek political power. That's why they kill politicians and journalists, and not just their fellow drug-dealers, and send out threatening messages to the public, such as bodies hanging on highway overpasses, in areas where they hold control.
Mexico is at war with these monsters. These monsters get cash from migrants, who willingly go along and pay the cartels.
That leaves Mexico holding the bag, having to fight rich cartels with money for huge armored vehicles and other trappings of conquest, all because they have the money to pay for these things. Not only do human-wave surges of mass migration mean big money from "fees," but they mean tied up Border Patrol forces, which gives them space to smuggle even more lucrative drug cargoes into the U.S. Tie the Border Patrol up changing diapers for every unwed mother rolling in from the world's third-world shantytowns, and it pretty well amounts to knocking an enemy out of action.
Money, money, money. The cartels are getting it, as surely as Putin is getting his gas money from Europe, while Mexico itself is getting poorer and poorer.
A recent report from Mexico is that the Mexican equivalent of the Border Patrol, the unarmed agents of the National Migration Institute, are quitting in droves now, over the issue of low pay and the emergence of "more violent" migrants. According to the New York Post:
Border agents in Mexico are fed up to the point of leaving their jobs — and say that, if the US lifts Title 42, things will only get worse.
"Work has doubled and even tripled for us. Some weeks we have no days off. We pull in double shifts for the same pay and are sent from one end of the country to the other with less money for our expenses that we must pay up front," said an officer, Jorge, who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal.
No statistics are available on how many officers have quit Mexican immigration forces. But Jorge said that, on one team alone, at least half of the 30 officers have quit over the last two years.
"It's a nationwide phenomenon," he said.
Gee, low pay and unappreciated government agents. Sound like a formula for payoffs? Well, it always has been.
Cash, in short, is flowing away from Mexico's government and toward Mexico's drug cartels as a result of this migrant surge, and the cartels are getting more powerful. Not only are the cartels getting more powerful, but Mexico's government is getting weaker and more unpopular as a result. We already know that border surges are unpopular with the public in Mexico, bringing in crime, disorder, chaos, and fattened cartels flashing their gold to all the communities they pass through.
That's left Mexico in a bind, courtesy of Joe Biden and his foolish acts to incentivize illegal immigration for all comers. Biden has already broken his treaties with Mexico, and Biden's vice president, Kamala Harris, has already left the Mexicans unimpressed.
Now Biden's trying to invite more migrants in with his battle to end Title 42, which sends a clear message to would-be illegal migrants everywhere that the gate's open and there's no need to pay no attention to U.S. border law.
Only a moron of Joe Biden's caliber could fail to discern that this isn't going to go over well with Mexico. Relations will be damaged, and it may take years to repair them. Recall that President Trump had warm and constructive relations with the president of Mexico, despite the differences in the two men's politics. Biden, though, has put the U.S. on a collision course with Mexico, mismanaging this relationship as badly as he has so many others. Mexico, as the late Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz used to say, is the country for Mexico, for which there is "no possibility of divorce." That underlines that relations with Mexico — one of the U.S.'s biggest trade partners, by the way — have always got to be good relations, and that's not just for them, but for us. Mexico can do horrible things to us if relations are not managed properly — and as the warning shot at Del Rio demonstrated, it will. Feckless Joe Biden doesn't seem sentient enough to know this, let alone able to predict human nature. As Bob Gates has posited, he's "wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue."
