Dear HCN,
Let me calm down a minute
here before trying to respond to Denver’s Wayne Schnell. His
bigotry in the July 3 issue deserves some comment and
analysis.
First, Mr. Schnell, if you want Mexican
nationals to stop coming to the U.S., stop hiring them to do the
work you disdain or find some legal way to employ them. Simple as
that. No demand, no supply, just like everything
else.
Your statistics are impressive but
meaningless unless compared to others. You’ll probably find, for
example, that the small percentage of people holding the vast
proportion of wealth in Mexico is not that far from the United
States. Mexico has been working hard to lower its birthrate, with
considerable success now that birth control and family planning are
legal and stressed by the government. When I first began visiting
Mexico 44 years ago, contraceptives were illegal, but the families
I know certainly do not have 10 children. The annual rate of
natural population increase is around 2 percent; that of the U.S.
is less than 1 percent.
“Norte Americano,” by the
way, is you, a person, not a place.
The outcome
of the recent elections in Mexico show that the people of Mexico
are totally fed up with the 71-year dictatorship of the PRI, and
more than anything they want change, not unlike their neighbors to
the north. The PAN president-elect is business-oriented,
church-oriented, and less friendly toward family planning, so it
will be interesting to see just which way and how far the pendulum
swings. You undoubtedly know that one result of the 1910 revolution
was the strict curtailment of the power of the Church, stripping it
of all land holdings and until just a few years ago forbidding even
the wearing of clerical garb outside the walls of the church
itself. Still, as you rightly observe, Catholicism is the dominant
religion of Mexico, as it is in Italy, Spain, Portugal and other
countries. Italy, Spain and Portugal, by the way, have a natural
growth rate less than that of the U.S.
We who
live along the Mexico-U.S. border have to deal on a daily basis
with the workers you employ and are just as desirous of an
equitable solution as you are, perhaps more so. But most of us are
sympathetic to the desperate needs of our hard-working friends from
Mexico. The majority of them want to make money here and go home,
and we would like to see some legal way of permitting them to do
so. Instead of railing against the horrors of the Brown Flood that
threatens your comfortable, white, Protestant world, investigate
the causes and work toward solutions. Take a look at the effects of
NAFTA, for example, if you can find an honest evaluation in the
corporate media. Examine the laws that restrict hiring, stare long
and hard at our immigration policies, check out the actions of the
Border Patrol. Fifty immigrants, including women and children, have
died this fiscal year while trying to outflank the green uniforms.
Find out what the WTO and the IMF have done to natural resources in
Mexico.
In short, open your mind and try to
understand the reasons for this perceived threat. And get to know
the people of Mexico. They are
wonderful.
Nicholas J.
Bleser
Tumacacori, Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Open your mind to Mexico.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
