About that Lousy Neighbor

The health and well-being of Americans are under attack from Mexico. We have spent hundreds of millions of federal dollars in a largely futile effort to block the billions of gallons of raw sewage and toxic chemicals dumped into the Tijuana River by an irresponsible third-world neighbor. The Mexican government has pledged, but not yet delivered, a reduction of only a fraction of that amount.

Mexico’s inefficient water use now routinely puts them in violation of their obligations to Texas agriculture under the 1944 Water Rights Treaty.

On immigration, crime and mutual security, Mexico’s current president seems to believe that the 5% of her country’s economy comprised entirely of remittances from Mexicans living and working (certainly not all legally) in the USA is an entitlement with zero reciprocal obligations.

Victor Davis Hanson has chronicled the uniformly negative impact of the importation of Mexican cultural dispositions towards law, vehicle liability insurance, property rights and waste disposal. Cartels run Mexican towns and regions with impunity.

Parasitic losers waving Mexican flags while rioting in our decaying urban centers are more reflective of their nation of origin than they realize.

Half a century ago, when I was an Army lab tech at Ft. Huachuca, AZ, it was common practice to drive across the border to Nogales to stock up on duty-free Scotch. But nobody in the medical company ever ate or drank anything there. Back in the lab there was a pet beef tapeworm (Taenia saginata) in a big glass jar filled with saline and Ringer’s. That strangely wiggling parasite survived for days in there after being evicted from the intestines of a soldier dumb enough to order a hamburger in Nogales. Beef and pork tapeworms are still endemic in Mexico. Those things are extinct in places with first-world sewage treatment. That is a basic civil engineering task for any modern nation.

In an economic war, both countries would lose, but Mexico would lose far more. It is time to leverage that reality to compel our bad neighbor to literally clean up its act. Complete border cooperation and total commitment to environmental responsibility. (Where the hell are the white liberal California greenies on this issue?—Tijuana’s filth is murdering Pacific marine life and closing California beaches.)

Financial and material aid in support of actual progress (as opposed to circular USAID grift or its Mexican equivalent) and serious joint efforts on crime, poverty, agriculture and environment would be better spent in North America than in worse places. But that requires mutual candor and an attitude adjustment south of the border, the attainment of which may well require serious financial pressure; a stick in proportion to a potentially generously sized carrot. It’s time. The country that sent those schmucks waving that flag in the face of our cops and federal law enforcement deserves a serious response.