Leave the gun, help troubled nations renew

Service for a slain police officer in Tijuana, Mexico

Preventive alternatives to symptom-response solutions to illegal immigration and the Mexican drug war

co-authored by Zach McElrath

What do illegal immigration and the exploding Mexican drug trade have in common?
We believe that both issues can be solved by an adjustment of bar graph ratios.
One of the big buzzwords today in medicine is “preventive.” The basic idea is not complicated: if we can prevent diseases and illnesses from occurring, then we can completely avoid having to find remedies for them. We want to take the discussion of illegal immigration and the Mexican drug trade and give it a seat on this preventive train of thought.
When we look at how the United States is approaching the explosion of the Mexican drug trade, America seems more than ready to “respond to the symptoms” by flexing its muscles and ramping up border control efforts. As the Mexican cartels devote more and more money and mercenaries to making sure their enterprises succeed, the U.S. has parried thrust for thrust, likewise increasing its allotment of both troops and money to the Mexican border.
We have no wish to deny that in fighting the drug cartels, the U.S. is working to execute public “justice.” But we cannot allow the story to end here. The ultimate problem is the prevalence of the drug trade itself, and no amount of killing gunrunners is going to slake America’s insatiable appetite for drugs.
Ah, there’s the rub: America is providing the demand for Mexican drugs while simultaneously trying to cut off the supply. The U.S. seems determined to prove that Albert Einstein was wrong when he cautioned: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Again, we’re not saying that law enforcement efforts should not be taken against those who take part in a morally reprehensible trade which ruins the lives of millions, but as we address the symptoms, we must not forget to address the causes.
As far as decreasing the American demand for drugs, there seems little to be done outside of shoring up various forms of domestic anti-drug propaganda. No matter how much the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) steps up its efforts, addicts are going to continue to find ways to slip through their nets. When it comes to decreasing the supply of drugs, however, we believe there is much that can be, should be, and already is being done in the area of community development and national economic reform initiatives.

While we acknowledge that every Mexican citizen who consciously contributes to the drug trade is morally culpable for making that choice, it would be far easier to say no if there were more compelling employment alternatives. If the U.S. were to direct even a small percentage of the money it currently allocates to the Border Patrol or the DEA to assisting NGO’s already working for local poverty alleviation and systemic reform in Mexico, the impact would be tremendous.

The same problems, we believe, lie at the bottom of the immigration crisis. The last two decades have seen a tremendous increase in U.S. immigration, legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America. Even before the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, the U.S. struggled to identify a lasting solution even as it worked to tighten border security in the short term. Since then the numbers have skyrocketed—as immigration exploded, so did Border Patrol funding. Most U.S. citizens would probably agree that, in the interest of providing for the common defense, illegal immigration is unacceptable. But there is no such uniformity of opposition to legal immigration. Even today’s youth, nearly a century removed from the mass immigrations of the late 19th and early 20th century, for the most part still recognize the hypocrisy of denying today’s immigrants an opportunity offered to our ancestors. But immigration poses many of the same problems to the U.S. today that it did a hundred years ago: an increase in jobs is by no means necessarily going to accompany an influx of workers. And it is not just the U.S. economy that suffers from too much immigration: every worker the U.S. gains is a worker another nation loses
Here, we believe, lies the source of the problem: Mexico and Central America cannot offer their workers sufficient employment opportunities. Recognizing that various community development organizations have already been working for years to resolve this problem through national and local initiatives, we concluded that the issue is not that the wrong solutions are being employed, but that they are not the priority. Homeland Security hiring more border guards and purchasing new Border Patrol tanks obviously cannot be pegged solely as a response to increased illegal immigration, but we think it fair to question an increase in funds tagged for symptomatic responses that is not accompanied by a much larger increase in funding for international development agencies, which work for preventive solutions.
Our recommendations are not revolutionary—our solution is simply to adjust the percentages of funding allocated to various capital expenditures. While we don’t expect this to happen overnight, we do recognize that it would take some incredibly intentional and aggressive lobbying to get this train moving faster than it already is. Our judgment that policy should be adjusted with a focus on development over guns and muscle is really tantamount to lowering the bar on one column of a spending graph while raising it on another.
Our point, ultimately, is that the most helpful solutions are not just already on the table—they’re already in play. The difficult task that remains is to work out the ratios.