Let's Press Mexico Regarding Those Young Central Americans

By David North on June 19, 2014

An important skill for political leaders is knowing how to use leverage to get someone else to do one's own dirty work. It's the kind of thing LBJ did all the time.

The Kings of Saudi Arabia have for years saved their people from fighting wars by conning America into doing its fighting, as in the First Gulf War, for example, just as the Brits used to employ Gurkhas for jungle fighting. Australia hires Papua-New Guinea to house its refugees; the list goes on.

Let's do a little of this ourselves, vis-a-vis the surge of young Central Americans now flooding into south Texas after long trips through Mexico. Let's cause Mexico to control its own southern border, to prevent this migration.

Using the specific approach I have in mind, no American judges, legislators, or Border Patrol agents will be involved. This will take neither legislation, nor diplomacy, nor massive expenditures. All it will take is a little executive talent and backbone.

How can pressure be applied to Mexico instantly to get that country to cut off the flow of Central American migrants? What do we need to do to get them, for example, to see to it that no one rides the "Train of Death", the south-north freight train that carries so many of these migrants through Mexico to our southern border?

Our government simply announces that Mexico — which sends us more than 100,000 nonimmigrant farm and unskilled non-farm workers (H-2As and H-2Bs) annually — can no longer be used for the recruitment of these workers.

We would not be terminating the program, or even reducing it; we simply would tell U.S. employers (who would not like it, if it actually happened) to look elsewhere for workers.

It is a simple, legal, unilateral executive action; my sense is that the threat of doing this would cause the government of Mexico to close its own southern border. Maybe we could sweeten the deal with a little financial help for their own border patrol.

It is not generally recognized that only some countries, 58 of them, can send us H-2A and H-2B workers; the list of qualified countries now includes Mexico, as one can see in the Federal Register.

Mexico should be dropped from the list, immediately, if it does not control emigration from its south.