President-elect Donald Trump recently had a “talk” with newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about the millions who have crossed through Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally.
Afterwards, Trump reported that their conversation went well, and supposedly both had agreed to secure the U.S. border.
But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.
Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.
What, then, is going on?
Over the last half-century, Mexico has gradually, even insidiously, developed both a one-sided, asymmetrical relationship with the U.S. based on professed mutual benefit and yet sought to leverage America by claiming it is supposedly guilty for two centuries of oppressive treatment.
How does the strange U.S.-Mexico supposed co-dependence seem to work?
The Mexican government has traditionally seen the U.S. as an endlessly wealthy country, liberally governed, and more or less willing to listen to Mexico’s grievances of the sort that are common in asymmetrical partnerships.
About 60 percent of the Mexican people traditionally in polls have voiced a positive view of the United States, yet a surprisingly low number when considering the millions who try to cross its border illegally each year.
Nonetheless, Mexico for decades has conveniently explained the vast influxes across the border, unaudited and illegal, as largely in America’s interests—and mirabile dictu even to Mexico’s disadvantage. Polls tell, however, a vastly different and far more accurate story.
Logically, some 61 percent of Mexicans in a recent 2024 Pew Center Research Poll voiced favorable views of the United States, whose open borders, generous welfare systems, billions of dollars in remittances, and now-defunct immigration laws they see as entirely in their interest. In contrast, 60 percent of Americans, one of the highest numbers on record, now hold unfavorable views of Mexico, perhaps because of the cynical harm it has done through a perforated border.
Mexico says its emigrants, along with those from Central and South America who cross its own borders with relative ease—often with tacit support—supply America with generations of industrious, low-cost labor, robbing it, in a sense, of millions of its own citizens.
It adds that the attractions of El Norte mean that Mexico must put up with human caravans crossing its own sovereign territory to supposedly meet the hungry American demand for labor, drugs, and sex. Indeed, nearly every recent Mexican president has argued that America’s thirst for lethal fentanyl is responsible for the creation of Mexican cartel lords that now run large swaths of Mexico itself.
Hellbound and Down 