People are not perfectly rational machines that calculate risk-reward benefits before doing something. People are emotional, persuadable, tribal, and often extremely self-sabotaging.
Many migrants from Mexico and Central America don’t want to be here in the sense of being deeply attached to the need to be Americans. People cross into the US because of family pressure, peer pressure, a desire to avoid legal problems in the home country, because they don’t want to feel like losers, because of “look at María’s son, he crossed and is now sending money for grandma’s medication”, because of large houses built with the money of the neighbors who crossed over, because of “everybody else is doing it”, because of “hey, at least it’s an adventure”, and so on.
By removing the temptation of the open border, we are doing those countries a big favor. We are undermining their oligarchies that have gotten extremely rich by exporting large percentages of their populations. We are leaving people in peace to figure out their lives in their own countries. The only kind thing to do is to end this travesty where we drag millions across the border, leaving their countries in abject misery.
If Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is deprived of remittance money, she’ll have to figure out how to keep the economy functional. She’ll be motivated actually to do something for the Mexican people. That’s a good thing. Once we close the border to people and money, she’ll have to show up, and Mexico will become a great country it deserves to be.
Clarissa's Blog 
“migrants from Mexico and Central America don’t want to be here in the sense of being deeply attached to the need to be Americans”
Indeed. An oral history of migration whose author interviewed hundreds of people in both countries (both migrants of various and those who stayed in Mexico but who were affected by migration). She said not a single Mexican she interviewed ever expressed any ambition to become American and most didn’t want to stay that long. Various factors might keep them in the US for longer than they intended (including the fact that crossing back into Mexican was far more dangerous than crossing into the US) but they were Mexicans and proud of it and wanted to stay that way.
The problem with the leftist approach is they get stuck on an idea of 874 years ago and won’t let go of it in the face of new evidence.
Mexican migration was a lot less problematic when there was less of it and more barriers to entry to the US so those migrating were at least better organized and had some kind of plan.
The easier it is to cross the more the chaotic poor who are incapable of planning pour in and of course the more criminals will be scouting out new victims as well…
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That’s exactly what I’m talking about. People who claim to be on the migrants’ side can’t be assed to talk to any. Salvadorans, for example, are intensely patriotic. When they used to march in those caravans with their national flag, that was completely sincere. Their government told them for 20 years that the most admirable way of being a Salvadoran was to leave and send money back. It was on billboards, in the press, in state documents. In the meantime, their abandoned children were joining gangs.
People love their countries, their language, culture, food, sports teams. They even love their shitty beer and greasy pupusas. It’s normal to be that way. Even a robot can get dinged and scratched during transportation. And humans are more fragile than robots.
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Can you direct me to these interviews? I’d love to read them.
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“direct me to these interviews?”
The book title was IIRC “Mexican Voices American Dreams” (or the reverse) from sometime in the early 1990s (very different from now) she doesn’t have anywhere near hundreds of interview in the book but I can believe she talked to hundreds of people on both sides of the border (and I assume some accounts are composites for the sake of anonymity).
One point I remember was that at that time there were no ‘smuggling rings’ but rather most people crossed due to private contacts and introductions made through what might be called ‘compadre chains’ (money did change hands but not during the trip). There were also individual criminal (rateros) who robbed or abandoned their charges…
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found it, thanks!
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I tend to think that for many Americans it is quite a big shock, when they first travel abroad, to find out that, a. the rest of the world is not like America and, b. most people do not want to be American.
Americanness is predicated on the fact that everybody would be American if they could and, secondly, that every country in the rest of the world would be or should be like America if it could. America is the model and Americanness is the prism through which they have been raised to see not just their own country but the whole world.
What I notice most in street interviews with young people in the US with a recent immigrant background is that they do not seem to know who they really are nor do they seem to understand where they really are. They look and sound like generic alienated people living in an alienated world. They look and sound as if deprived of a real sense of time and space.
It’s very sad.
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With people who were brought over as children, there’s also the issue of language. More and more often, I see young people who don’t have what we perceive as “the first language” or “the mother tongue”. It’s simply not there. They speak English and some smattering of Spanish but neither is at the level of comfortable fluency. It’s kind of scary, to be honest.
Large part of the low academic achievement among Hispanics in the US is the result of this. People lost their own language and did not acquire another to a degree where it could compensate. They don’t understand figurative language and can’t process works of fiction. The intellect isn’t lacking. Language is.
It’s very disturbing.
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This was a big deal with the first-gen Viet-kieu. A lot of parents went so all-in on their kids being AMERICAN, that they spoke English to them at home, and did not teach them Viet. It was… kind of tragic. Those kids learned really terrible English at home, that school wasn’t always able to undo, *and* they weren’t able to communicate with grandparents and older relatives 😦 They did better when they just spoke Viet at home, and learned English at school.
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“They did better when they just spoke Viet at home, and learned English at school.”
That’s pretty much what Viet Kieu in Poland did/do and it works. But you also have a culture that values learning (including to some extent learning for the sake of learning). Mexico doesn’t really have that.
And I’ll mention an old hobby-horse… what I call hispanic bibliophobia. I’ve known lots of lovely Latin Americans with no interest in reading whatsoever (and who regarded my reading as kind of a weird way to pass the time). The real contradiction of Hispanic civilization is the contrast between thriving high quality literature and a public that mostly doesn’t want to bother reading.
The same thing in Spain with Zarzuelas (kind of operettas) the music is often great and you can imagine that some of the composers could have done much more with the genre but the public was okay with silly plots and silly songs….
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“And I’ll mention an old hobby-horse… what I call hispanic bibliophobia. I’ve known lots of lovely Latin Americans with no interest in reading whatsoever (and who regarded my reading as kind of a weird way to pass the time). The real contradiction of Hispanic civilization is the contrast between thriving high quality literature and a public that mostly doesn’t want to bother reading”
That’s funny because my mother is a bibliophobe who barely reads anything and thinks reading is a waste of time, but my father was a bibliophile who had a huge book collection and would read anything, both are Cuban immigrants. My brother and I are bibliophiles who will read anything, then again my father’s people were Galician and they’re outliers compared to other Spanish people
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They value learning, but IMO mostly as a ticket to a good job. The core value there is *commerce*. Not that learning is devalued or anything… and there’s kind of a mania for poetry which is perhaps not surprising given the foundation of a very extremely context-dependent, metaphor-heavy language.
That first group of kids got pushed into med school in a big way.
Later groups have looked hard at the success and liabilities of that cohort, and many of them sort of ran the numbers on expense of school, the limitations imposed by insurance and overhead, and instead went for jobs like radiologist, where the payoff-to-debt/stress ratio was better, even if it wasn’t as prestigious.
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I’ve seen this in a lot of high schoolers I’ve worked with, especially Hispanic students. They have parents who dragged them here so the adults can work and have no intention of settling here, so the kids physically live in the US but mentally they’re back in their home country. They see no reason to learn proper English or do well in school since they feel they’ll be going home anyways, they’re the laziest kids and a pain to teach anything
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This is impossible to explain to people who aren’t in the teaching profession. They don’t think it’s possible to not have a first language. I also thought it was not possible until I encountered it. This has a catastrophic impact on many things.
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I’ve only seen this issue with Hispanic students, the Asian, African, Eastern European and other immigrant students aren’t like this. These kids have parents who intended to settle here permanently and made an effort to fit in, the kids see themselves as Americans and often speak excellent English with our local accent and are among the top performing students. This is what happens when parents immigrated with their children and are here to settle, they see the US as their country and not a piggy bank
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“Many migrants from Mexico and Central America don’t want to be here in the sense of being deeply attached to the need to be Americans.”
Most Hispanics fall into that category.
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I guess it depends on what kind of Hispanic people, Mexican and Central American peasants who see the US as a piggy bank don’t want to be Americans and just want to make money. My family are Cuban exiles who fled Castro and are proud to be American, they got citizenship as soon as possible and several family members have served in the military. I have no intention of visiting Cuba and you could not pay me to visit Cuba, I am an American from New Jersey, thank you very much
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Exactly. These are different people with different motivations. Accepting Cubans who fled from Castro was good. Those were real refugees. But today’s Central America is a very different place. Pro-immigration people keep repeating that they “flee wartorn countries”. When I ask which specific country in Central America is at war and with whom, they start to pout.
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The Brazilians I’ve known who went through the whole naturalization process seem to have adapted really well.
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My relatives in the UK and Canada got their kids SA passports. This is part of the old time British empire/commonwealth identity.
The 100% Afrikaner apartheid government allowed dual citizenship for Anglos essentially to compensate for less political rights.
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