Tom Friedman sounds look he took his first trip to Mexico in about the last ten years or so. What do you know, young Mexicans are on the internet, the country has a manufacturing sector, but it is still governed horribly and is increasingly under siege by violent drug traffickers. What a News Flash!
Here’s a reality check, Tom. Monterrey is an exceptionally tech-savvy and educated part of Mexico. Mexico has been an important American trading partner forever, even though guys like you have never seen a draconian initiative by the Chinese communists that you didn’t swoon for. Mexico has always been governed badly, and its government and crime problems are getting worse. People in Mexico are often more diverse and educated than the impoverished and uneducated cohorts that migrate illegally to the US. Mexico depends on the US as a safety valve for its poor and source of revenue to the same in the form of remittances. Mexicans in the US, who are almost exclusively low or working class and have low levels of education, seem to have no impact on our cultural life and no visibility for guys-like-Tom-Friedman.
Mexico is unfortunately in several binds. Its bad government, relatively high wages, and low levels of human capital make it a worse bet for cheap manufacturing than China, where workers are cheap, high IQ, and oppressed. Mexico’s internal problems are also making the country less attractive for manufacturers than it was even ten years ago. It is approaching Somalia territory on the border. Finally, Mexico suffers from many of the same social problems as America, including high levels of divorce, illegitimacy, drug abuse, and over-reliance on the welfare state, that sap it people of their potential. I’d love to see our leaders more concerned with strengthening Mexico than China, but we should not get carried away just because we’re surprised to learn Mexico has it share of MBAs and start ups. It has for years and years, but its patterns of corruptions and crime have been there for years and years too.
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A couple of observations. Mexicans seem to cling to Spanish too tightly as though it is the only way they can preserve their culture. It is evident by the explosion of Spanish language media in this country and the push to have Spanish a de facto second language.
The nation of Mexico is probably too uptight about not being submissive to their northern neighbor that they missed the boat on English. Around the world people are accepting that English is becoming the world’s language, and many without Anglo-Saxon ties are using it in schools and as one of their official languages. Here is a good explanationof this by a Japanese professor.
Had Mexico gone full monty on English, they could be benefiting right now with call center positions that are being farmed out instead to India and The Philippines. With her close proximity to the US, Mexico should be as familiar with America as Canada, and be in a position to take advantage of being next to the world’s biggest economy. Instead Mexico, unlike Canada, is pretty alien to most Americans.
Finally, Steve Sailer had a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post in December where a commenter suggested we arm our Mexican immigrants and send them back to Mexico to overthrow the corrupt government and put something a little more democratic in its place. If we are going to spend ten years nation building a worthless trash heap like Afghanistan, you’d think we might do the same for Mexico which is actually in our national interest to do so.