There are echoes of the past as Mexico and Texas trade barbs, their leaders on opposite sides of the migration issue.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador this week reacted negatively to legislation signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday that allows law enforcement in the Lone Star State to arrest illegal aliens and compel them to either leave the country or be prosecuted on misdemeanor charges for illegally crossing the border.
Per the new law, those migrants who do not comply are subject to re-arrest, after which they could be slapped with felony charges.
As Reuters reports, López Obrador called the legislation “inhumane” and said his government is preparing to challenge it.
“The foreign ministry is already working on the process to challenge this law,” said the Mexican president, who has previously criticized Abbott — as well as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — and called on Mexican Americans not to vote for either Republican politician.
Fox News further quoted López Obrador and his government:
“The Texas governor acts that way because he wants to be the Republican vice presidential candidate and wants to win popularity with these measures,” Lopez Obrador said. “He’s not going to win anything. On the contrary, he is going to lose support because there are a lot of Mexicans in Texas, a lot of migrants.”
“We reiterate the position of the Government of Mexico that the placement of wire buoys by the Texas authorities is a violation of our sovereignty,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “We express our concern about the impact on the human rights and personal safety of migrants that these state policies will have, which run counter to the close collaboration between our country and the federal government of the United States.”
López Obrador also blamed Texas’ border policies for the deaths of two migrants in the Rio Grande River, which he linked to Texas’ construction of buoys over which the Mexican foreign ministry had filed a complaint against the state.
Abbott’s office pushed back at the remarks with a statement of its own, countering that the two deaths in question occurred before the migrants made it to the barrier and contending that drownings already happened before the buoys were ever put up.
“This is a result of the reckless open border policies of President Biden and President Lopez Obrador. In fact, before Texas deployed barriers, the United Nations declared the U.S.-Mexico border the deadliest land crossing in the world,” said an Abbott spokesperson. “If President Biden and President López Obrador truly cared about human life, they would do their jobs and secure the border.”
In addition to encouraging Mexican Americans to vote against Republicans such as Abbott and DeSantis (calling them “those who persecute migrants”), López Obrador, a leftist, earlier this year launched an information campaign targeting Mexicans in the United States to mobilize them against strict migration policies, which he says are an “offense against the people of Mexico, a lack of respect for our independence, our sovereignty” — even though it is America that is having its sovereignty eroded by illegal aliens illicitly crossing the border by way of Mexico.
As The New American recently reported, many illegal aliens are being smuggled into the United States thanks to Mexican bus and van lines, which send dozens of buses a day to “random” spots along the border — spots through which the migrants attempt to cross into America.
This has prompted U.S. Customs and Border Protection to go after the transportation companies. “The measures include specific law enforcement operations focused on transportation companies and their employees who are facilitating migrant smuggling activities,” declared Troy Miller, a CBP senior official, in a statement earlier this month.
The migrant crisis in America is to a major degree exacerbated by Mexico’s inability to get its own migrant flow under control. After all, illegal aliens en route to the United States must first arrive in Mexico — and many of these are not Mexicans, but foreigners who are illegal in Mexico as well. If Mexico were to successfully curb the illegal migrant flow into its own country from Central America, Africa, and Asia, then the human traffic to America would significantly be reduced.
One of the problems is that drug cartels wield vast influence in Mexican politics — and human smuggling across the border has become as much a cash cow for the cartels as the drug trade.
But despite López Obrador’s “information campaign,” the crime and fiscal woes affecting communities across the United States are testament enough that the migrant crisis is real and not a question of racial prejudice, as the Left asserts.
This is why even Hispanic Republicans who support Donald Trump have remained steadfast through the years and continue to do so even now as the media once more attempts to frame Trump as prejudiced against Latinos. While they may not always agree with the rhetoric, they agree with the truth behind the rhetoric — that illegal migration is wrong and, at its current levels, is bringing the nation to a breaking point.
