The Distraction of Mexico’s 10,000 Troops
The Mexican president must disband her country’s network of NGOs that bring millions of illegals to the U.S. border.
Three cheers for President Donald Trump’s tariff threat, which concentrated the minds of Mexico’s leaders on their country’s role in undermining U.S. security, particularly when it comes to illegal immigration. While the illicit drug trade is a more difficult nut to crack, President Claudia Sheinbaum can do much more to prevent illegal migrants going north.
Trump’s team is certainly monitoring the situation by reviewing the numbers of encounters with illegals crossing from Mexico. This data not only includes Mexicans, it also counts third-country nationals who use our southern neighbor’s territory as a staging base to move north. Trump also wants a decrease in narcotics trafficking, but the intelligence on ferreting out and quantifying drug smuggling is a much trickier business than tabulating illegal migrants. Trump’s first message to Sheinbaum is that he expects illegal migrant numbers from Mexico to evaporate and stay down, or he will be right back to talking tariffs. The American national interest deserves nothing less.
Recent U.S. presidents—Bush, Obama, and Biden—always tried to make defending the national interest vis-à-vis Mexico a joint project. That was the reason that Washington and Mexico City invested so much in the failed Merida Plan, which turned out to be another doomed nation-building exercise in Mexico, wasting a decade, countless lives, and billions of U.S. assistance dollars.
The Biden administration’s version of this “we-are-in-this-together” diplomacy with Mexico was the pompously titled “Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities.” Rarely was there less actual security cooperation between the two countries, except that both governments quietly collaborated in managing the flow of unlawful migrants into the United States. Under the terms of this secret dealmaking, Mexico received U.S. assistance funds—which Elon Musk’s DOGE should make public—to modulate the travel of illegals to the border, so that admission numbers stayed only at levels that Biden officials cynically thought they could get away with.
“We-are-in-this-together” diplomacy gives cover for politicians of both governments to escape responsibility, and it served the Washington foreign policy establishment for years to help blunt demands that Mexico do more, particularly in stopping illegal migrants. “We-are-in-this together” diplomacy does not tabulate results, but is all about bilateral “process.” Even more than their U.S. counterparts, Mexican politicians are enamored with process, be it diplomatic, political, or policy—any smokescreen that helps to hide the lack of results.
To his credit, our CEO president does not care two pesos about process. Trump’s tariff threats repudiate the old approach that puts Washington and Mexico City in the same boat. He expects Mexico to act. As the Mexican president scrambles to hold on to past practices, she of course reaches back to the old shibboleths, such as the appetite of Americans for illicit drugs, or the U.S. economy’s need for illegal labor, or the smuggling of weapons from the United States into Mexico.
True, Sheinbaum may have some fair points. For example, the White House should issue an EO instituting E-Verify to hinder American business from hiring illegal workers, but Trump must not take his eye off the ball: The central, overriding issue is that Mexico is a massive staging ground for unlawful migrants to enter the United States. In offering up 10,000 troops for the border, Sheinbaum is diverting attention away from reckoning with the core issue: Mexico facilitates the movement of migrants northward through a range of economic activities that bring our southern neighbor billions of dollars in revenues. This is licit business activity, which takes place outside of criminal cartel migrant smuggling.
First, Sheinbaum seeks to protect the more than $60 billion a year in remittances sent by migrants (including millions of illegals) in the U.S. back to Mexico, making up 4.5 percent of the economy. It is the country’s greatest source of foreign income. Then there is the fact that countless Mexican non-criminal economic enterprises benefit from the transport, feeding, and lodging of these migrants on their move north. Long predating the open-border Biden administration, Mexico has maintained for years one of the world’s most extensive support networks to assist and shelter unlawful migrants on their travel to el Norte.
It is big business. Mexico’s illegal migrant industry is designed to move not just a few thousands but hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants—under Biden, millions—to the U.S. frontier. The migrants pay cash into Mexico’s massive informal economy, which makes up 30 percent of national GDP. Millions of marginalized Mexicans, on the fringes of their country’s modern economy, live and operate in this Dickensian ecosystem.
Their legally gray activities are robustly supported by a network of activists, social workers, and lawyers financed by global NGOs and powerful United Nations and international organizations, which operate across Mexico, dispersing vast funds that employ Mexicans and bring in well-salaried foreigner expats. Again, the objective is to move migrants to the U.S. border. During the Biden years, these international groups had U.S. funding raining on them.
This faux “human rights” enterprise, in cahoots with Mexico City, constantly renews itself with follow-on waves of illegals into the country. Mexico’s long-standing open-border policies impose few visa requirements on third-country nationals arriving on international flights and make only feeble efforts to control the country’s porous southern frontier.
These legal and semi-legal migrant-support activities blur, of course, into Mexico’s dark complex of corruption and criminality. Countless Mexican government officials profit from payoffs and other bribes that grease the migrant-flow machinery. Then, ultimately, the entire migrant support industry interfaces into Mexico’s notorious and semi-sovereign networks of criminal cartels, which control access to the U.S. border and turn the human chattel stream into vast profits. During the open-border Biden years, the illegal migrant business blossomed into a $13 billion bonanza.
None of this will be easy for Sheinbaum to change, of course, but she clearly is not even making an effort. Her offer to dispatch an extra 10,000 national guardsmen to help cover the almost 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexican land border is not a serious response to Trump. Mexico’s National Guard is a second-rate force, hastily stood up a few years ago to replace the country’s ineffectual Federal Police, which itself was disbanded for corruption.
When the Mexican president is serious, let her start by announcing that she is taking down the migrant support empire of NGOs and international organizations operating in her country. Let her announce that she is imposing rigorous visa requirements on all foreign nationals entering Mexico. Also, let her announce that she is dispatching an additional 50,000 Mexican soldiers (SEDENA) and marines (SEMAR) to both the southern and northern frontiers. Sheinbaum’s offer of the Mexican national guard, instead of the country’s professional military, is just a dodge.
The American president should take to Truth Social and start a debate with Sheinbaum about Mexico’s role in illegal immigration. This is another discussion that Trump will surely win, and he is also likely to find much common ground with ordinary Mexican citizens, likewise fed up with millions of illegal migrants traipsing across their country.
Our CEO president must keep up the pressure and that means closely counting the numbers of illegals encountered at the border. Given Sheinbaum’s response so far, there is a good chance Trump will soon be calling again about tariffs.
The post The Distraction of Mexico’s 10,000 Troops appeared first on The American Conservative.
