A brief history of the U.S. and Mexico,

There is a history to our southern border and immigration across it.

American school-children barely learn it. American adults barely acknowledge it.

It started when the U.S invaded a neighboring democratic country and took half its territory.

Erich Almasy read my post last Tuesday, in which I speculated that if Kamala Harris lost the election it would likely be due to votes lost because Biden allowed for too long a surge of undocumented immigrants at the border. The disorder gave Trump an issue that polls show moves voters' opinions. Erich responded on Thursday, arguing that immigration was a net positive to the U.S., so we should stop complaining. Today he added a bit of history and context to that politically troublesome southern border.

In retirement, Erich and his wife Cynthia Blanton, both college classmates, live in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende.

Erich Almasy, at a replica Resolute desk at the George Bush Presidential Library in Dallas

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Unauthorized Immigration – There is a Will and a Way 

In 1821, after 300 years of disease-based genocide and mass servitude, México, along with most of Latin and South America, achieved independence from Spain. By 1828, México was a democratic republic in which President Vincente Guerrero abolished slavery. The border with the United States was the Sabine River, separating Arkansas and the Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila. The border was essentially unguarded, and as the price of cotton skyrocketed, the lure of prime bottomland was irresistible to many Americans who crossed into México. Ironically, an influx of murderers, rapists, and other criminals evading prosecution in the United States became so great that México closed the border in 1830.

 

By 1836, the Anglo immigrants (Texians) joined many native-born Tejanos in clamoring for independence from México. Their interest was to enter the United States as a slave state. The Alamo is not remembered for noble reasons.* The rebels succeeded, and by 1845, the Republic of Texas was the 28th state (a slave state) of the United States. In 1846, President James K. Polk, calling upon a Manifest Destiny instigated what Ulysses S. Grant (who served in it) later described in his Memoirs: “I do not think that there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on México.”** At the war’s end in 1848, México was forced to yield 55 percent of its land mass - the states of Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado and Arizona, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Borders are often porous. Through the 1940s and 50s, the border between the United States and Mexico was largely porous since many cities were, in fact, “twinning” (Brownsville/Matamoros, McAllen/Reynosa, Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Del Rio/Ciudad Acuña, Rio Grande City/Tamaulipas, El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, and Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras), with the border a painted line down the middle of a street. During World War II, wives of officers at the U.S. Army base in Eagle Pass would drive to the Victory Club restaurant in Piedras Negras, where the maître’d Ignacio (‘Nacho’) Anaya would prepare a baked corn chip, cheese, and jalapeño dish to have with their drinks. Ergo, Nachos!

 

The 1,954-mile border between the United States and México spans six Mexican and four American states, covering terrain from dense urban to parched desert. It is the most frequently crossed border globally, with approximately 350 million documented crossings annually. Most of the border follows the Rio Grande River (Rio Bravo del Norte) and includes maritime boundaries in the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. There are 35 official border crossings with México, and the total population of adjacent cities and counties is over 12 million. The San Ysidro Port of Entry between San Ysidro, California, and Tijuana, Baja California alone, has roughly 60,000 vehicles and 30,000 pedestrians crossing daily.

 

In addition to managing the flow of documented immigrants, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) inspects shipped goods and agricultural products and interdicts illegal drugs along over 8,000 miles of border, not just the one between México and the United States. Although it is among the largest law enforcement agencies in the world with over 65,000 employees, CPB’s budget for its Border Patrol grew by only $2.3 billion (to $7.3 billion) from FY2022 to FY2024 during the height of the unauthorized immigrant surge. There were 19,357 border patrol agents in 2022, and that number has not substantially increased due to six to eight percent annual attrition and the time needed to train new agents. About 85 percent are stationed at the southern border.

 

The problem for CPB is immense in terms of distances covered and volumes of people and goods processed. In addition, CPB must house detained immigrants and support the adjudication of legal causes for entry, such as political asylum. The present economic/political-driven surge in unauthorized immigrants came from over 97 countries, in particular, those from the Golden Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala), Venezuela, and Haiti. It is estimated that 6.1 million people, or over one-fifth of Venezuela’s 2022 population of 28.3 million, have dispersed into North and South America. This is the largest population displacement in Latin American history.

 

During the height of the pandemic, Trump’s administration was able to utilize Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 to stop or expel all immigrants at the border. By May 2022, it was clear that unauthorized immigrants were not spreading COVID-19 (we were doing just fine by ourselves), and the law was suspended. Unfortunately, the economic and political effects of COVID-19 continued, and the CBP was now unequipped to deal with the surge. In February 2024, after the 249,741 unauthorized immigrant encounters of December 2023, the Senate, under the direction of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, killed a bipartisan bill crafted, in large part, by conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma. Most Republican senators didn’t even read the bill after Trump denounced it for political reasons. Its $19.6 billion cost would:

 

1. Stop all immigration when weekly crossings exceeds 5,000.

2. Alter the "humanitarian parole" definition

3. Provide 50,000 detention beds for detention processing

4. Modify asylum treatment to a “reasonable possibility” standard.

5. Increase Border Patrol recruitment and streamline hiring.

6. Fund mandatory monitoring.

 

Do we have the political will and the financial means to create a manageable border? I believe we do, and both James Lankford and most Democratic senators members agree. 

 

Note one: Books to read:             

*Forget the Alamo - Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stafford

** A Wicked War – Amy S. Greenberg

 

Note two: The parallels between Polk’s invasion of México in 1847 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are astonishing: one democratic republic invading another, religious and God-ordained justification, civilian population atrocities, and relative size of the combatants. In México, the war is referred to as The Intervention. In the United States, it remains the only conflict not celebrated with a memorial on the National Mall.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]