A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people.
Some approximate stats:
Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year.
The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m.
One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by those statistics/events.
Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations. More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?
Everything you wrote is correct. However, Mexico is actually an immigration success story. The net migration flow is around zero [1].
The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.
"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.
Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.
The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.
More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]
A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.
For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)
Yep. 1-2 years is a judge. The official median is 7 years, which afaict is being quite generous. And agreed, it's gotten a lot harder even for folks most would say we should be fighting to attract.
One of the best things the US can do for its economy IMO is get back to being better at brain drain, and helping naturalize the people ready to work hard in general. They make jobs and help drive the American spirit because they basically have to. That's a tough message for people in struggling industries & towns, but it's hard to make a competitive & growing American economy when the job makers and doers are instead growing the economies of competing countries.
As a job maker, successful scientist, OSS supporter, & thankful refugee granted citizenship, immigration has become simultaneously one of the most American things to me... and one of the most bizarre.
People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that.
Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei.
Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
> People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that
I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.
> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?
I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.
> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.
We're talking about immigration, and more specifically how a State might approach it.
There are situations where the situation is so manifestly bad, that a prima facie approach to granting refugee status to asylum seekers (aka "opening the floodgates") from a specific location is the kind thing to do.
We've for instance seen countries do this for Syrians in 2015, Rohingya in 2017, Ukrainians in 2022.
But of course this is only viable (among other reasons, politically) for specific groups at specific times, whereas for other groups or at other times the case-by-case treatment of asylum requests has to be done again.
BTW, looking this up I was surprised to learn that the right to asylum initially did NOT cover people fleeing war, and some countries still do not consider it a valid reason to get a refugee status, among them the USA.
They're fleeing Putin's strategically-created crises in Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. He gives you the flu, blames the aspirin, and sells you the Ivermectin.
Lol, you really really think that south americans being forced to emigrate to the north is putin's fault? It's entirely USA's fault, bringing up putin when talking about immigration in USA is the whatabautism part here :)
Maduro shat the bed himself with perhaps the aid of his indoctrinated chavistas. They used to get help from Cuba. In any case, it’s their problem. Even Columbia, their neighbors and co-Bolivarians don’t like them going into their country illegally. They also want them out.
Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow the repressive government and create a new beautiful shining beacon in the southern cone.
An implication of your statement is that Putin does this to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that these people weaken rather than strengthen us.
