The Mexican Border

Howard Buffet, son of the famous investor, Warren Buffet, runs his own foundation.  He has been a farmer, a businessman, elected official, photographer, law enforcement officer and a humanitarian.  Seeking solutions to hunger, border security and public safety, he is currently serving as the sheriff of Macon County, IL.  He owns a ranch directly on the border.  He has been in Mexico numerous times and at one time was a good friend of a former president of Mexico.  He has been to Central America, El Salvador.  So he has tons of first hand knowledge and experience about our border, about the drug traffic coming across the border.  He is strong on law and order and border security, but underlying those problems he realizes its more than a security problem, its an economic problem, a human problem.

His 350 page book titled, "Our Fifty State Border Crisis", how the Mexican border fuels the drug epidemic across America.  In chapter 17, he lists three fallacies.

1.  "The idea that the majority of the people crossing our borders today are Mexican criminals is wrong."

2.  "We cannot ignore the historical role Mexican laborers, both undocumented and documented, play in our agricultural economy.  They are not stealing our jobs."

3.  "Threatening to force Mexico to pay for a wall is likely to backfire."

"I first met President Zedillo after his election in 1995.  I have seen and spoken with him many times in my visits to Mexico and at other events.  Zedillo explained, "Mexicans universally feel that their country was dispossessed of half of their country by the United States.  To them this remains a tragedy of incredible proportions."

"He is referring to the consequences of the Mexican/American War.  In the mid nineteenth century the US invaded Mexico.  After fighting was done, the treaty and the Gadsden Purchase ceded what is now CA, Nevada, AZ, New Mexico, WO, TX, Utah and Western CO--almost half the territory of Mexico to the US.  That is a lot of land.  The Mexican people felt intensely wronged by the outcome of that war, and those feelings have complicated our relationship to the present day."

Our invasion of Mexico was flat out imperialism, oppression.  But most Americans act like it never happened, or that it happened a long time ago; let's move on.  I congratulate Buffet for mentioning this issue in his book, but Buffet does not apologize as a citizen of the US for this evil we did to Mexico.  He should have said, and didn't, "I repent for my country.  As a citizen I will do all that I can to engage in restitution and repair."  So the issue between the US and Mexico is more than border security.  It is flat out oppression.

And of course, oppression has been part and partial of US history.  We also took almost all of Indian land and made it ours, and we robbed slaves of their labor.  Somehow, Americans seem to feel free to oppress others and see it all as God's will, which we call Manifest Destiny.