If you prefer, in order to answer the OP, hypothetically, lets say almost everyone in Mexico has good employment. Would they still leave?
Probably not. Why would they? As noted, there isn’t a huge influx now because the jobs aren’t there. Without the lure of work, the incentive to move here is significantly reduced.
But if you wan to make everyone content in a country of ~120,000,000 people, I’d like to see the math as to how that actually works. That is, what does it cost?
Mexico’s a middle income nation when compared globally, but there are still huge wealth disparities there- in practice, much larger than in the US. Combine that with endemic corruption and an ongoing low-level drug cartel insurgency/civil war/what have you, and it’s not surprising that people would still want to illegally emigrate to the US.
I actually had a discussion with a Mexican classmate in graduate school about corruption- the defining thing wasn’t that corruption is eliminated in the US -far from it. What the big difference to me was that here in the US, government and other official agencies/people do their basic jobs interacting with the common people without requiring bribes or kickbacks in the general case. Bribery usually happens when someone wants something out of the ordinary or outside the system. In Mexico, it was described to me that you usually have to bribe someone just to get them to do their job.
An example was that in the US, if some knuckleheaded child can’t quite make it in to the college of their choice, then their parents may resort to greasing palms. In Mexico, you have to grease the palms even if you’re a qualified student.
To me, that seems like a systemic difference in corruption that would have to be overcome for Mexico to be a more inviting place to live.
Well, unless you’re a low-level functionary. 
In the form of direct payments to the poor, or capital for economic development, something like that?
I don’t think direct payments to the poor is the answer. From what I have witnessed, anything given for free, falls short of the objectives. Capital for economic development may work, if it is sustainable.
I am sure the whole world would like to see how it works. It is probably an utopian idea.
But does it provide a solution? Or does it continue for decades to come?
How do you inject capital into the economy “outside of the corruption chain”?
Of course that’s reasonable - like I said earlier, there’s still an economic argument for Mexicans to try to move to the US, and that’s especially true for the poorer ones among them.
The question is how we let that influence our decision on how to handle the situation. What got me thinking about this was the OP talking about how people in Mexico are so close to their relatives and the only reason they come to the US is that they need to “feed their families.” While that’s probably true for some people, I think that phrase paints a distorted image of how dire the situation in Mexico is. Most Mexican immigrants are undoubtedly trying to improve their families’ lives, and probably will materially improve their families’ lives by coming to the US. But from a country like Mexico I doubt it’s often a life or death matter of being able to feed your family.
If there were a clear solution where we could pay to make Mexico a completely first world country on par with the rest of North America that would be one thing. But there’s not, and probably no matter what we did Mexico would lag some way behind the US for decades to come. We can try to help them, sure, but in the meantime while the wage gap exists there’s nothing wrong with securing the border.
ok… i think i’m a little closer to their families really really need the extra help but i can’t exactly dismiss your comments either
Easy. Set up a foundation, made up of good people to distribute it.
Mexico receives a lot of direct foreign investment already. The thing is, though, there’s no way to get around corruption through DFI. You can avoid some forms of it that way (ie, bureaucrats in charge of aid disbursement skimming off the top and/or directing funds to their cronies). But other forms - police shakedowns, the need for bribes to secure permits, the government discouraging competing with their private-sector cronies in exchange for kickbacks - can only be fought directly, by the Mexican government itself.
In previous cases where the U.S. has played a role in the successful economic development of a nation - post-war Japan and Germany - they had a level of power and control that they can’t bring to bear on Mexico, without defeating it in a war.
No. Mexico has a lower per capita income than Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Panama, and a lower human development index than Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba.
It is certainly an upper middle income country though, in a global context.
Unless I missed a post somewhere, everyone here also seems to be ignoring the fact that rather than being a pure negative on the balance sheet, undocumented immigrant’s add a great deal to the economy in terms of labor, taxes and economic activity. So you can’t just look at how much is spent on illegal immigrants and say that that is who much we will save if they all went away.
I also find it amusing that the cite you use to support your billions spent is a fact check article whose conclusion is that such claims are heavily exaggerated.
[QUOTE= OP’s cite]
a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office examined 29 reports on state and local costs published over 15 years in an attempt to answer this question. CBO concluded that most of the estimates determined that illegal immigrants impose a net cost to state and local governments but “that impact is most likely modest.” CBO said “no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost on a national level.”
[/QUOTE]
Well, Wikipedia is certainly fallible, but the point stands about its relative standing globally.
First, I didn’t spend the billions. The USA did. My checking account couldn’t do it.
If you can wade through the cite, it will eventually give a correct estimate of the amount spent.
If Mexicans did not feel the need to go to the U.S to work, then they would not. Their first choice would be staying in their home country. If everything were fine in Mexico then yes a lot of people woud stop coming to the U.S, except for tourists and visiting family members, because millions of Mexicans have family members who are legally here because many southern states were once a part of Mexico and those families have been there since before those areas became part of the United States. So immigration/visiting to the U.S from Mexico would still continue, just not as much as right now with how the quality of life is for many Mexicans. Mexicans are very proud of their homeland and when away tend to miss it dearly.
The pay in Mexico is far less than that of comparable work in the United States. I worked for a company which closed and moved its manufacturing to Mexico. They were paying machinist (both CNC and manual) roughly $25 a day. Most of them( the majority who could speak English passably) crossed the border to find work in the US.
It got so bad that they had to outsource their machining because they couldn’t keep qualified personnel.