KEEPING TEXAS TEXAN

 Submitted by: Joshua Trevino

The Homestead: Keeping Texas Texan

Across nearly two centuries of history, the Texas-Mexico relationship has run the gamut:

      

from the generosity of republican Mexico’s invitation to Texian settlement,
        to the savagery of General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s dictatorship,
        to the tumult of almost a century of border depredations and raids,
        to the mutual enrichment of trade and culture immeasurably improving both nations,
        to the real friendship between two lands bound by history and blood.

Texans my age and older — I’m a Generation X-er who remembers the Soviet Union and VHS tapes — grew up with a Mexico that was relatively benign. My family is from south Texas: my father’s family is from Laredo, and my mother’s is from Corpus Christi. To them, and to me as a child, Mexico was often as not a nice place for a day trip. You could drop off the kids in Laredo with relatives, and go have lunch in Nuevo Laredo. (I was on the kid-dropped-off end of this one.) Interested in a nice shopping outing? Walk across the Rio Grande into Nuevo Progreso. Interested in a foreign-exchange program for your high schooler? There are some good ones in Monterrey — and it’s only a five-hour drive from Corpus Christi. Mexico wasn’t safe, exactly, but it didn’t feel any more unsafe than, say, contemporaneous New York City.

And the Mexicans sure are nicer than New Yorkers.

All this is unthinkable now. Hardly anyone goes into Nuevo Laredo anymore, and hardly anyone feels safe driving their children from Corpus Christi to Monterrey. My great-grandmother’s hometown of Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas, was taken over by the Zetas about a decade back: some of the refugees showed up in my grandfather’s hometown of Roma, Texas.

The Mexico we grew up with has succumbed to a Mexico that is, in many ways, the most threatening it has been since the 1910-1920 period. That, of course, was the era of the Mexican Revolution, which saw Mexican raids into Texas communities like San Ygnacio, the Brite Ranch, and beyond. Mexico isn’t convulsed by revolution now, nor do we see anything like Revolution-era raids into Texas. Nevertheless Mexico is declining into a sort of criminal anarchy: President Trump’s own Ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, recently estimated that the Mexican government has lost control of 35% to 40% of its own country — to the cartels. Worse, he accused Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, of essentially acquiescing to the slow cartel takeover of his nation.

AMLO reacted to Ambassador Landau’s comments with furious indignation, because the Ambassador is right.

All this is context: when we look at the border crisis now — and make no mistake, it is a comprehensive crisis — we must understand that there are two major causes for it. One, of course, is the Biden Administration’s wishcasting on migration and its causes. You can’t send the signals they’ve sent, nor implement the policies they have, and not expect exactly what we’ve seen: a renewed and worsened crisis of human trafficking and desperation on our southern border. They walked with eyes open into the present situation, and they bear the responsibility for it. The fact that elements within the Administration are now talking about border-wall construction tells you all you need to know about their own view of their own policies.

The other cause is Mexico’s own political dysfunction, which has seen a vibrant, industrious, productive country and people subsumed by the nexus of corrupt elites and criminal syndicates. The problem isn’t Mexicans as such: I’m one, so consider me biased — but also consider the extraordinary flourishing of manufacturing and enterprise seen in Mexico in the aftermath of NAFTA. Consider too that Mexico in the last decade started producing more engineers annually than Germany or Canada; or that Mexico arguably tipped into a majority middle-class nation in the same period. Given good governance and good civics, Mexicans compete with anyone.

But that good governance and good civics isn’t on hand when Mexican elites and Mexican criminals are one and the same.

The Biden Administration isn’t going to address this. A D.C. policy community that brims with ideas and approaches — good and bad alike — in places like Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and Afghanistan falls curiously mute when it comes to our most important neighbor. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, on the other hand, is keeping watch — and thinking about what comes next. This is one of the most essential and innovative components of our longstanding immigration and border security work. It’s the reason we went to Mexico City in late 2019 to have conversations with Americans and Mexicans alike, to understand the dynamics undergirding the policies and the outcomes. It’s the reason we go to the Texas-Mexico border again and again — we’ll be in Del Rio, Texas, in just a few weeks — to see firsthand the situation on the ground. It’s the reason we talk to an array of informed policymakers and officeholders: we’ve even chatted with Ambassador Landau. It’s the reason we engage longtime veterans of American law-and-justice efforts in Mexico, like former Department of Justice prosecutor Joshua Jones, to work directly on our border-security work.

Where the policy consensus ossifies and fails, the Texas Public Policy Foundation innovates and succeeds.

Why do we do it? It isn’t because we’re out to fix Mexico. We’d like to see it happen, but only the Mexicans can do that. No one controls a nation’s destiny to the degree that the people of a nation do. (This is, by the bye, why the Biden Administration’s attempts to nation-build in Central America will eventually fail.) In that spirit, we do this for our own country: Texas. Texans look to Mexico with neighborly sympathy — but with the interests of Texas first. Texas communities require a Mexico that is, at minimum, at peace. We’ve seen the alternative throughout history: and we aren’t going back to that. So long as Texas, Texas communities, and Texan families are at risk because Washington, D.C., implements feckless policy, and because Mexico City can’t govern, our Foundation will engage — and act.

That’s a promise.

For Texas —
Joshua Treviño