Lately, there has been a fair amount of news about the INS capturing Mexicans trying to enter the USA. Mexicans enter this country to get jobs, but why can’t they get jobs in Mexico? Why is the U.S. economy better? If unemployment is so bad in Mexico, why don’t entrepreneurs open up more businesses in Mexico? Rather than Texas, why not build a manufacturing plant in Chihuahua and utilize all that inexpensive labor? (With manufacturing all going to Mexico, sooner or later things would balance)
I can only think of two reasons why our economy is better: (1): the USA has more natural resources, and resources create wealth. But Mexico has all that oil and I would think that this would be a boon to the Mexican economy. or (2): Government regulation stifles the economy.
The moderators should probably move this one to G.D.
You asked a big question and I won’t pretend to have all the answers. It takes much more than cheap labor to build a strong economy. The workforce needs to be well educated and that’s part of the problem. There are a lot of foreign owne plants in Mexico but only within the limits of the infrastructure and skilled labor available.
Mexico could be in for some massive changes if the presidente-elect has his way. His vision is to have EU style open borders and markets. No one can accusing him of having modest goals.
Wow! you cannot answer this in a short paragraph but here goes.
I do not believe it is a matter of natural resources but a matter of culture. Countries with many resources are poor (Africa, South America, Asia) while countries with few resources are rich (Switzerland, Northern Europe).
Note that countries with British culture are rich while countries which were colonized by the Spanish are poor.
It is a matter of culture but it takes generations to build that culture and to build a country. It cannot be done in a few years.
Note I say the culture and not the people because many of those people go to other countries and do very well. Cubans in Florida have done extremely well.
Texas, Arizona, California, could today just as well be part of Mexico and would be very different but they are subject to the influence of the rest of the USA.
Also note that within Mexico there are people and industries doing quite well while within the USA there are segments of the population doing pretty badly. It has to do with their culture.
Also note that countries which were destroyed during WWII were reconstructed within one generation while the first world has been sending tons of money and help to the third world for over 40 years and they have little to show for it.
I also think Mexicos biggest problem is it’s government structure. The country has been run by crooks for the last 200 years. They care little for the general populace.
A major factor is infrastructure. Many American companies have manufacturing facilities in Mexico, attracted by the cheap labor. (Mexican imigrants tend to earn more money here than at home, which is another good reason to come here.) The companies usually send newer automated equipment first, based on the idea that less training will be required. After the first series of power outages, even momentary ones, the people in charge of reprograming the automated equipment move the machines back to the U.S. and send down older equipment that doesn’t lose it’s memory with every dip. There is a lack of reliable water, gas, and electrical service in many areas, which makes running a business hard. The laws, environmental, labor, etc., are less well defined, if they exist, and therefore attractive - until they mess up and someone complains to an official. Then they learn that their facility can be closed or confiscated based on the judgement of such an official, and many time appeal is hard. Laws both restrict and protect. If you avoid restrictions, look out for the backlash when someone gets annoyed or hurt.
Now most American owned manufacturing facilities in Mexico are run by local people, who know the rules and the culture, and can make it work. They also know the realistic limitations, and make sure that expectations are realistic. Why not more? I think it is a perception thing. Many of the first big companies that moved part of their operations down there had results that were good, but less wonderful than the projections so they were judged to be failures. It’s makes anyone else thinking about it look at their numbers twice, and downgrade them to a big degree. There is still expansion into Mexico going on, but most of the people who could make a go of it already have facilities there.
As someone noted above, this is a big question (but a good one). I’ll only mention one aspect of the situation.
Corruption is endemic in Mexico and when it exists to the degree that it does there, it seems an incurable problem.
Let me add that I grew up in and still live in Texas. I have many Mexican friends and have been there several times. If somebody wants to call me for some perceived racial or ethnic name calling, let me assure you in advance that you’re barking up the wrong tree.
There’s some corruption everywhere. But some countries see it spread way down stream, and Mexico is one of those. How do you attack it when it gets to the point that everyone assumes that any encounter with officialdom will require some greasing of palms? I don’t know, although I’ve pondered the question with respect to Mexico many times.
While we have the occasional contractor fix up some things for a councilman who might have some say on a stadium concession contract, our traffic cops are generally not thinking about picking up tonight’s whoopee money when they pull someone over. I really don’t expect that I’ll need some ready “extra” cash when I go down to the courthouse to move some paperwork along.
And it is petty. I hate to say it, but I’ve bribed a customs officer (or whatever there border cops are called) the equivalent of $0.25 to give me a visa (just paper-clipped to my driver’s license - no problemo - yes, I know that is not mexican spanish). And I’ve feigned complete ignorance of spanish when dealing with federales on the highway (how much of a language barrier are you willing to tackle to get $2 out of me?). The point of noting that it is so petty is just to reinforce how pervasive it is.
The recent elections are encouraging; not so much to me because I’m a foe of the PRI - I’m neither friend nor foe - more so because it indicates some real democratic stirrings are working in the populace - I think. They need us and we need them. The elections just give me some hope that the Mexico I like can possibly begin to surmount her problems, the endemic corruption being high on the list of obstacles to the democratic rule of law.
And that rule of law becoming something one can rely on is critical to the function of an economy that encourages remunerative entrepreneurial endeavor. And once you’ve got a bunch of little capitalists running around getting big ideas, you see class changes.
Corruption. Mexico has very entrenched corruption at all levels of the government. I can’t think of very many economies where the powerful steal, and the economy is successful.
Russia, Nigeria, Zaire, Brazil are all cases in point.
Institutionalized/ economic racism. In Latin America, white skinned people have held upper class and wealthy status for centuries. Paople of mixed race are next, followed by Africans and Indians holding only the most menial of jobs.
I was in Playa Del Carmen this summer, and was in an all inclusive resort where the help was almost all dark skinned part Indian people. Many of the waiters and bellhops were intelligent, well spoken and multilingual, but because of the caste system in Mexico, they were stuck being . . well waiters and bellhops.
Kind of like going into a McDonalds in America and its all black people waiting on white folks. We obvoously have the same problem here the US of A, just without the rampant corruption.
You dont see too many white Mexicans trying to swim across the Rio Grande, do you?
A culture of ethics, of rules, is something very fragile that requires the active support of the great majority of the people. Many Americans take it for granted without realising how fragile it is. As you have said, there is corruption everywhere and it takes a strong cultural bias against it to prevent it from spreading. Once it achieves a critical mass it is virtually unstopable. An individual cannot fight it on his own and any progress he wants to make has to be by participating in it.
Washington DC is a good example. It was run directly by the Congress until it was given a measure of home rule. Instead of running a model government which would disprove those who said it could not work, the people who came in were making out like bandits. Corruption was rampant, inefficiency was huge, people were appointed that had absolutely no qualifications, waste was everywhere, the city was bankrupt, services had degraded to an awful point… I cannot believe Mexico is worse than DC but DC had the luck of being in … DC and the Feds stepped in and appointed a control board.
What I am trying to say is that DC had achieved the critical mass where it was past the point of no return if left alone. It would have become something like one of those African countries where chaos reigns. It took an outside force to prevent that.
I do not share the view that in corrupt countries like Mexico it is the politicians at the top who should be blamed. I believe the entire culture is to blame from top to bottom. As has been often said, a country has the government it deserves.
It is up to all of us to maintain a culture of ethics. Every time someone does something antisocial, even if small, he is undermining that culture.
I do not know that much about the changes taking place in mexico but I believe improvement, if it does come, will come very slowly. You cannot change cultures overnight.
Not going to get into a comparison of cultural values between Mexico and the U.S. A number of posters are making some pretty derogatory comments about Mexico, and it is only fair to say that there are a number of factors where I find Mexican cultural superior to the U.S. – for example, the emphasis on family and group.
However, on a simple level, the question was why Mexican employees come into the U.S., even if illegally, to find work. Answer: the minimum wage in Mexico is just over MXP 30 per day – that’s about US$ 3.00 PER DAY, compared to the U.S. minimum wage of about $5 PER HOUR. So, lesse, if you could multiply your income by a factor of almost 20 times, wouldn’t you risk running across a border illegally?
labdude, I do not believe that is true but even if it were it does not contradict my view that the wealth of nations lies in their people and in their culture. Many countries in the third world are very rich in natural resources and yet are very poor.
Countries that have been exploited for centuries by colonial powers tend not to do very well, comparatively, against countries that have not been so exploited.
When the population has spent centuries with a slave-class (or subservient class) and an upper-class of the rich and powerful, with very little middle class to speak of, I ain’t surprised that the country is undeveloped. The native populations and native cultures were either wiped out or forced into a slave-type population, and the colonial powers imposed a regime that lasted a few hundred years. Such indoctrinations are not easily overcome.
There is a certain element in some posts here that seem to imply that the third world countries should be themselves blamed for not “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps” and bettering their situation. I can only say, that it ain’t anywhere near that easy.
Mexico is doing much, much better than so many other Latin American countries.
CKDextHavn, I couldn’t disagree more with your PC view. (Well, maybe I could but I’m feeling lazy today).
Backward countries were backward before they were colonized, they developed in the measure they were colonized and they returned back to backwarddom in the measure they rejected the legacy of their colonizers.
Sorry but I do not believe for a minute that the fate of Africa today was caused in the least by European colonization.
I’m somewhere between Sailor and CKDextHvn on this extremely complicated issue, but leaning more towards sailor. This isn’t to say that colonial powers had no effect; they did. South Africa wouldn’t look anything like it does today without the British. Same for India. Or heck, the United States, for that matter. Japan is a favorite example of a nation that did “bootstrap” itself into the twentieth century.
There’s a highly enjoyable book called “the Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Why some are so Rich and Some so Poor” which goes into some great detail on this very topic. The author, whose name escapes me, is very snarky and asks many uncomfortable questions. Good stuff.
Let’s turn the question around. The real question is not why Mexico is poor, the question is how did America get so rich. For 99% of the history of the world, 99% of the population has been desperately poor. What’s amazing about the current period is that there are large numbers of people in large parts of the world that are not desperately poor.
It strikes me that Mexico is a pretty normal country…it is run the way most countries have been run. The US/Western Europe/Japan are atypical countries. We are wealthy because we kind of found a recipe for wealth by accident…the rule of law, capitalism, and governmental accountability through democracy. Other places that don’t have those things are by default poor, since there is no way to get ahead without stealing from someone else.
CKDextHavn: Yes, most of the countries that are poor were colonized, and are still poor in the wake of colonization. When people are talking about the culture, they are not neccesarily blaming third world people, they are observing what those places are like. People don’t hold the government responsible for things, because such an attitude is not helpful. If you’ve never lived in a place where governement officials didn’t abuse their authority, why should you expect them to act differently? No, you are resigned to the corruption, because there is no way out.
And we can see that it would be very difficult to change from a slave society to a civil society, even if the slaves are freed…a slave has different strategies for survival than a citizen. Why should a slave work hard, or save money? It will all be taken away fromt them. So a slave will only work to escape punishment…they may have to work very hard, but they don’t have a “work ethic”…they obviously don’t connect hard work with reward, they are slaves! Hard work rewards the master, therefore hard work is stupid and hateful.
And of course, slaves are not educated, they have no civil society, etc. So of course a former slave society will be poor, they have few human resources.
Like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Jamaica. Or are you talking about Uruguay, Argentina and the other Spanish coutnries.
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But wouldn’t they take their culture with them? One of the main reasons why people say Asians do well is their “culture”, and yet many of these Asian countries are quite poor.
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You’re right about this. The government has a lot to do with a countries success, but again, it isn’t the “culture”
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Again this is bullshit. The reason why the Irish were so poor was becasue of their “culture”, and yet they are doing ok now. I haven’t noticed a change in the culture, have you? The reason Eastern Europeans do so poorly is the “culture”.
Marshall plan anyone? Also the first world has not been sending tons of money, they ave been extracting it. there is a reason why the Congo has more natural rescources than almost anywhere else on earth and they are still dirt poor, and I’m telling you it aint the culture. The same “culture” that you say causes Venezuela to be poor at one point allowed it to be quite wealthy. Then the market dropped on oil.
There is a reason why the standard of living has dropped in Africa from 50 years ago, and it has a lot to do with world bank loans and colonializsm. Please show a cite on how much money has actually been flowing into the “third world” thanks. In some cases over 40% of the domstic budgets of countries is going simply to pay off the interest on debts. If the US were paying 40% of it’s budget in debt interest you would see a drop in our standard of living too.
The poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa now owe more than $200 billion in foreign debt - three times more than they earn annually in exports. About 20 percent of sub-Saharan African countries’ export income (not counting South Africa) goes to make interest payments on foreign debt. A huge part of their economies must be devoted to producing goods for export - with the resultant income sent back out of the economy and not available for domestic use.
and as for this
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Where the hell does this come from? How did China and Equador and venezuela reject the legacy of the colonizers? Do you have some evidence, maybe some antecdotes at least?
Mexico is poor because it does not emphasize education. It does not emphasize education because most of the people work in industrial-agricultural jobs, much like us in the 1900s. Most of the people work in bad jobs because they lack the education to get out of them. See the vicious cycle? It begins and ends with education, a theory supported by the fact that their corrupt and at times unstable government refuses to support educational government. The Spanish did impart their culture on them, most definitely. Roman Catholicism, slavery of certain races, and valuing the group over the self. Not all bad, really, but it tends to produce a society that is hidebound, ruled by a racially homogenous male elite, militaristic even against itself, and more inclined to totalitarianism moderated by revolution rather than the more British transition of power (yes, yes, War of the Roses and Oliver Cromwell, but when’s the last time London was stormed by revolutionaries?). I think one thing will solve this mess: A new generation less inclined to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Familial respect and filial duty does not extend to slavishly repeating the mistakes of the past, and I think the rest of the world is beginning to see that.
On India: India is still an agrarian, corrupt system and very traditional. I think traditionalism taken to extremes is the cause of its problems.
Disclaimer: ALL THINGS IN MODERATION! It bears yelling. Traditionalism is very useful sometimes, as it keeps changes at a slow burn. Without a certain respect for one’s past, you end up like the Soviet Union during the Bolshevik days or France during the Reign of Terror. However, a slavish following of tradition leads to stagnation as the old ways work less and less in a new world. How well would a traditional hunter-gatherer or subsistance farmer do in NYC?
Oldscratch, I can see we are just going to have to agree to disagree but I’ll give you some observations anyway.
>> Like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Jamaica. Or are you talking about Uruguay, Argentina and the other Spanish coutnries.
Well, as I said, in the measure they have kept british culture. The USA, Canada, Australia and other countries have mostly kept British culture and are successful economies. India has assimilated it to a lesser degree and to such a degree it is a more successful country in its own evironment. About the only stable democracy in that part of the world and some pretty developed industry etc. Of course it does have a lot of poverty. The more a segment was untouched, the more it remains poor.
British colonies in Africa are also poorer in the measure they rejected the colonizing culture.
Argentina is hardly an example of a successful country when it recently had one of the worst dictatorships. India has had more stability in government than Argentina.
I said: Also note that within Mexico there are people and industries doing quite well while within the USA there are segments of the population doing pretty badly. It has to do with their culture.
Your response: Again this is bullshit
I will try to ignore the rudeness of your response for a moment. You deny there are segments of the American population who are not doing well? You must be kidding. I am in Washington DC and there are slums just a few blocks from the White House and the Capitol. And you say everybody in Mexico is poor? Again you gotta be kidding. I have worked in Mexico and I have seen a lot of wealth and a wide middle class. You can go to many malls and you would not know you are not in the USA. You cannot deny that. So you are saying it has nothing to do with the culture of those groups? The middle and upper classes in Mexico are well educated (many in the USA I would add) and the Americans at the lowest level have close to no education and no culture of work. And you tell me this is pure coincidence? I don’t believe so.
>> Where the hell does this come from?
Look, I don’t like your tone. Let’s just agree to disagree.
I apologize for the tone. I’ve been a little off recently. Personal circumstances and such (I’m usually somewhat arogant and rude, but not this much), it’s still no excuse.
My rudely frased “bullshit” was refering to your blaming economics on culture. It’s the other way around. In an area with widespread poverty you will find a cutlure that reflects that, in an area of wealth, the culture reflects that, in an area with a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, the culture will reflect that. Not the other way around.
I think culture makes wealth and not the other way around.
The Cubans who escaped the communist revolution with nothing have done much better than the cubans who stayed in cuba with all the wealth they stole.
Many third world countries are extremely rich in natural resources and yet… never mind, I know I am not going to convince you. As I said, we’ll just have to agree to disagree