Mexico's Entitlement Thinking

Entitled to our wealth, to our land, to our charity:

Teddy Roosevelt's wife was once sitting next to the French ambassador at a state dinner. She took the occasion to hector him over his country's heavily militarized border with Germany. "Why don't you adopt our policy?" she asked, citing the three thousand mile border with Canada which was as tranquil as it was unfortified. "We would gladly exchange policies," replied the ambassador, Jean Jusserand. "If we could first exchange neighbors."

It seems like there are two kinds of good neighbors. The kind that need good fences as a reminder, and the kind that are capable of refreshing their own memories. Somewhere in between lies Mexico. They're not likely to come sashaying over the Maginot Line anytime soon. On the other hand, they're not policing the border properly to ensure orderly crossing of their emigrants. They're not actively belligerent, but they are criminally negligent.

This, you would think, would make them, if not downright contrite, at least a tad sheepish. But you would be thinking wrong. Not only do they make no apologies for their Federales taking a siesta on the trabajo, but they threaten a lawsuit if we presume to station some of our Guardsmen along our side of the line. Which makes you begin to wonder whether their benign neglect has come to take on a malign cast.

No one is saying that Mexico has hostile intentions toward the United States. Certainly they are not like China or Iran, or even Venezuela, who calculate that their lives would improve somehow if the U.S. became diminished in stature. In theory, Mexico wants us to remain strong and prosperous, a circumstance which has many positive spillover effects for them. We protect them merely by being here, we enrich them with our commerce and we save them from the type of chronic nervousness that Monsieur Jusserand expressed.

Yet they have in the course of time become spoiled, developing certain bad habits by virtue of our largesse. They have become accustomed to the convenience of using our businesses and farms as the employer of last resort for their unskilled laborers. Additionally, those migrant workers send checks home to their families, pitching bales of cash back into the Mexican economy. And the most hopeless, bottomed-out members of their society can be counted on to go north and never come back.

None of those benefits that we have been providing, wittingly or otherwise, is a birthright of Mexico. Their rhetoric, invoking law or principle, is mostly bluster. This is about interest, not principle. Unless a bad habit of long standing evolves into an entitlement, a sort of easement. Bottom line, they have no legitimate claim on us to continue forfeiting our rights. They should count themselves lucky that we never bestirred ourselves to legitimate self-defense in the past.

Good thing we didn't---the Democrat lawyers are already lining up to sue us for having the audacity to say we want to defend our borders.