Seriously, annex Mexico?

Great Debates
1

The goofy immigration thread was rightfully closed, but I never got a chance to pose a serious question that applied to it.

Would most, or even many, Mexican citizens want to be part of a Mexican-US government? There’s at least 4 or 5 states worth of land and population there, which means that they’d have considerable influence in the government. We wouldn’t just be adding another Hawaii or Alaska, but doing more of a government and culture “merger”.

I don’t really care if it’s a good idea or not, or if US citizens would go for it. I’m just wondering whether many Mexicans would rather be Mexican-Americans.

2

Puerto Rico has been U.S. territory since 1898, and public opinion there is still divided between those who favor independence, statehood, or an indefinite continuation of commonwealth status. The question would have been decided in favor of statehood long ago if the Puerto Ricans were not Spanish-speaking Catholics who will never, ever be full members of the American cultural community (unless they move to the mainland).

3

Well, it depends if we want to consider the reconquista movement. To some people, lands in the Southwest are their homes. That’s it, end of discussion. I’m sure this has been brought up in the previous thread.

My prediction is that you’d see a 70/30 split against joining the States.

Also, note the xenophobes. They’d (if they’d accept the Mexican-American merger at all) want to limit the legislative power that Mexico would have. I’d think it’d get split up, but that’d give Mexico more “power”. We’d have some serious debates in the states how to reconcile that.
Edited to Add: I wasn’t around when they added Hawaii. How did they reconcile the problem then,** Brain Glutton**? Was it just a matter of the States wanting to get their way for military reasons?

4

Hawaii was a guaranteed Democrat stronghold and Alaska was a guaranteed Republican stronhold and the census (with subsequent reapportionment) was just around the corner. By admitting each (nearly) simultaneously, each party got two extra senators and one extra representative without messing up the balance of power in exchange for making the strategic value of each location more firmly part of the Union.

5

In short, American businessmen staged a coup against the Hawaiian monarchy, and ran the government as a “republic” until a U.S. President came along who was willing to annex the nation.

6

Mexico is already divided into 31 states (and is, like the U.S., a federal republic of long-standing, so we’re not just talking about administrative regions or departments here); even if hell did freeze over, it would be a tough sell convincing the Mexicans they should for some reason give up their current states instead of just having them all admitted on equal terms to the new Union. (Mexico’s least populous state has a population about equal to that of our least populous state, Wyoming.) Even if you insisted on dividing Mexico into new states with populations all equal to the average state population in the U.S., we’re talking about another 18 states.

Put it another way, Mexico’s population is over a third that of the U.S. Definitely not another Alaska or Hawaii.

7

Speaking for myself, never.

8

With Mexico as with Canada, the sense of what is the national identity includes perforce a large factor of that it is NOT the USA.

But more bluntly, the USA has never been too effective assimilating a territory with a large population in both numbers and density, that has an already well-established institutional civil society. Heck, Lousisana still uses Napoleonic Law… The way the US has normally assimilated new territory is by grabbing relatively unpopulated space and settling it. In the case of Hawaii, LOUNE, the already relatively sparse autochtonous Hawaiian population had been displaced economically into a position of dependency upon American and East Asian immigrants by the time of the coup; and then was demographically displaced into “minority” status.

That was one of the issues that were brought to the fore after 1898 with the former Spanish colonies: in PR and the Phillippines, you had LARGE native populations with well-established cultural identities. This is also one of the reasons the USA did not annex the core homeland of Mexico in 1848.

Well, except for the million of us who are Evangelicals… :smiley:
And our large contingent of JWs…
And, well, Get a Load of this Guy??? :eek:

But yes, when one reads the writings from c. 1900, it’s impressive how we’re shamelessy described as “aliens” who must wait until when and IF brought up to the standards of “anglo-saxon civilization” to be brought into the fold. So the US power structure never made a concerted effort to steer us in the direction of statehood (of loyalty, yes, but that’s a different thing…).

This attitude would be untenable in the current age; if the Mexicans ever consented, you’d have to admit them “as-is”, with all that this implies. Can you imagine a transition where northerners and Mexicans who are ideologically committed to “American values” actually** *take over * ** the running of things until the Mexicans are up to speed? That would be essentially repeating the “Reconstruction” of the US South, and we know how succesful THAT was in establishing permanent change, eliminating social and political wrongs, and creating good will towards the Feds…

[aside]

Considering half of the people who mark “Puerto Rican” on the Census Form are in the mainland, it helps that the “mainland cultural community” IS characterized by a patchwork of enclaves of all sorts, from Lubavitcher to Amish to Hmong… And our biggest and loudest nationalist cells ARE traditionally stateside :smiley: So it cuts both ways: a lot of the resistance to statehood is driven by fear that it WILL finally obliterate the last excuse for loudly proclaiming yourself NOT assimilated.
[/aside]

9

As mentioned, Mexico has 31 states. In addition, it is about a third of the present US. As a result the entry of Mexico into the Union would upset the apple cart all to heck.

On the other hand it makes a great “What If?” Nothing more.

10

:eek: You’re admitting that publicly?!

Have you no shame?!

Guess not . . .

11

Okay, so assume that the new Mexican American government would include Mexico as 31 new states. Would Mexicans want to join this government, with all of the political power they would wield?

12

The future historians will talk about the great migration. When the people in Mexico walked over to the US and settled down . Not much we can do about it if it continues to increase profits. If we remove the profits it will stop.

13

You have it backward. Hawaii was considered a guaranteed Republican stronghold and Alaska was a guaranteed Democratic stronghold. This didn’t last very long in Hawaii after statehood (and, in fact, started to change before statehood), due mostly to the efforts of John Burns to mobilize the plantation workers. Alaska didn’t go Republican until 1966.

14

In any case, the role Mexican representatives, senators and electoral votes would play in the American partisan balance is imponderable. None of the Mexican political parties are clearly analogous to the Pubs or the Dems; within the Union, they would remain separate, regional parties, supporting now the Dems and now the Pubs according to political calculations of the moment.

15

This is over simplistic. Hawaii was a Constitutional Monarchy, the new Queen was preparing to abrobate the Constituion, and rule as an abolute Monarch. It was the Reform party who threw her out, and although the Reform party did contain most of the Islands white businessman population, it had plenty of natives too.

16

Well, IIRC what she was going to repeal was in turn called by nationalists “the Bayonet Constitution” because, they claimed, a large contingent of US Marines in ships outside the harbor had exerted some influence in its being approved during Kalakua’s reign; and the idea was to restore the prior version of the constitution – to restore power to the old native aristocracy; not quite rule “absolutely”, more like the royal house was used by the nativist nationalist faction to make a last-chance move. In any case, Dole and Bishop & Co. promptly turned around to deliver the nation into the US as a territory, getting themselves appointed as territorial governors and secretaries. So all in all not the finest hour for anyone involved, except perhaps President Cleveland who decided he would not accept the hand-over of a usurped sovereignty.

17

Well put. Iraq would be a walk in the park as compared to annexing Mexico unwillingly – which is a sure bet.

Just the notion is beyond Twilight Zone’s territory. In a century or so, if trends stay as they are, the US will be a Latin-dominated/run country. And not a bullet fired.

18

A lot of Americans might be brown a hundred years from now – but almost all of them will speak English at home. And look down their noses at Mexico.

19

What BrainGlutton said. The Mexican immigrants are assimilating just like any other wave of immigrants, despite the paranoid ranting of the xenophobes. Possibly some more Spanish words will be absorbed into American English, and so what ? That’s what English does. “English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammer.”

Honestly, in a century we’ll probably be worrying over the proliferation of cyborgs, AIs, and the genetically engineered; worrying about brown people will be passe I expect. Chrome people, on the other hand . . .

20

That is a paraphrase of a quotation by James Nicoll. The original wording: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alley ways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”