A Simple Solution To The Mexican Border Issues

By James Donahue

The brew-ha-ha between the United States and Mexico over “illegal aliens” and narcotics trafficking, and even the loss of a lot of American jobs to factories that moved to Mexico to take advantage of cheap non-union labor, could be resolved in two simple steps.

Well, perhaps they aren’t as simple to accomplish as it is to describe them. But if we could get everybody to agree, these proposals would work, they are feasible, and a lot of people would benefit.

1.)  Negotiate to accept Mexico as a United States Territory and/or a fifty-first state. That would make all Mexicans citizens of the United States and Americans would be citizens of Mexico. Then the people of the Mexican Territory could legally come to the United States to work, and Americans could easily go there.

2.)  Put an end to the War on Drugs. Legalize marijuana and put medical controls on all of the other narcotics so that identified drug offenders can get their fix with a doctor’s prescription.

Tearing down the Mexican border would open the vast and beautiful Nation of Mexico to Americans to travel there and to live and work there without obstruction. Some of the unemployed folk in the United States might even be able to compete for jobs at plants like General Motors, Ford, Maytag and hundreds of other former U.S. firms that “outsourced” to Mexico.

Ironically, a recent Bloomberg story noted that there are so many job opportunities now offered in Mexico, right near the American border, that many of those “illegal aliens” are now risking their lives to cross the border back into Mexico.

And something else is happening among the workers in those Mexican plants. They are starting to organize for better working conditions. It is hot in Mexico, and one of the things the workers would really like on the job is air conditioning.

Legalizing drugs would quickly put organized narcotics gangs out of business, stop the border wars and make both Mexico and the Southwestern United States a safer place to live and visit. It also would provide safe, pharmaceutical grade drugs for users and bring extra tax dollars into government coffers.

The legalization of drugs would also release a lot of people from our jails and prisons who should not be there. It would lighten the tax burden on our police, our courts and the prison system.

The more you think about it, there are so many benefits from just doing these two things that I cannot understand why it hasn’t been done a long time ago. Instead of fighting and hating our neighbors, we should be reaching out to them in every way possible.