The Second Mexican War

By Lawrence Auster, FrontPageMagazine.com

February 17, 2006

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21309

The Mexican invasion of the United States began decades ago as a spontaneous migration of ordinary Mexicans into the U.S. seeking economic opportunities. It has morphed into a campaign to occupy and gain power over our country—a project encouraged, abetted, and organized by the Mexican state and supported by the leading elements of Mexican society.

It is, in other words, war. War does not have to consist of armed conflict. War can consist of any hostile course of action undertaken by one country to weaken, harm, and dominate another country. Mexico is waging war on the U.S. through mass immigration illegal and legal, through the assertion of Mexican national claims over the U.S., and through the subversion of its laws and sovereignty, all having the common end of bringing the southwestern part of the U.S. under the control of the expanding Mexican nation, and of increasing Mexico's political and cultural influence over the U.S. as a whole.

Cultural imperialism

We experience Mexico’s assault on our country incrementally—as a series of mini crises, each of which calls forth some new change in policy. Because it has been with us so long and has become part of the cultural and political air we breathe, it is hard for us to see the deep logic behind our immigration “problem.” Focusing on border incursions, guest workers, changes of government in Mexico City, and other such transient events—all of them framed by the media’s obfuscation of whether or not illegal immigration’s costs outweigh its benefits and the maudlin script of “immigrant’s rights”—we don’t get the Big Picture: that Mexico is promoting and carrying out an attack on the United States and in so doing the Mexican government is representing the desires of the Mexican people.

What are these desires?

(1) Political revanchism—to regain control of the territories Mexico lost to the U.S. in 1848, thus avenging themselves for the humiliations they feel they have suffered at our hands for the last century and a half;

(2) Cultural imperialism—to expand the Mexican culture and the Spanish language into North America; and especially

(3) Economic parasitism—to maintain and increase the flow of billions of dollars that Mexicans in the U.S. send back to their relatives at home every year, a major factor keeping the chronically troubled Mexican economy afloat and the corrupt Mexican political system cocooned in its status quo.

These motives are shared by the Mexican masses and the elites. According to a Zogby poll in 2002, 58 percent of the Mexican people believed the U.S. Southwest belongs to Mexico, and 57 percent believed that Mexicans have the right to enter the United States without U.S. permission. Only small minorities disagreed with these propositions.

For Mexico's opinion shapers, it is simply a truism that the great northern migration is a reconquista of lands belonging to Mexico, the righting of a great historic wrong. "A peaceful mass of people … carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history" [emphasis added], wrote columnist Carlos Loret de Mola for Mexico City's Excelsior newspaper in 1982....

Similarly, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska told the Venezuelan journal El Imparcial on July 3rd, 2001:

The people of the poor, the lice-ridden and the cucarachas are advancing in the United States, a country that wants to speak Spanish because 33.4 million Hispanics impose their culture...Mexico is recovering the territories ceded to the United States with migratory tactics...[This phenomenon] fills me with jubilation, because the Hispanics can have a growing force between Patagonia and Alaska.

The Mexicans, as Poniatowska sees it, have changed from resentful losers—which was the way Octavio Paz saw them in his famous 1960 study, The Labyrinth of Solitude—into winners. What accounts for this change? Their expansion northward into the U.S., as the vanguard of a Hispanic conquest of all of North America—cultural imperialism and national vengeance combined in one great volkish movement.

Politicians echo the same aggressive sentiments. At an International Congress of the Spanish Language in Spain in October 2000, Vicente Fox, soon to become president of Mexico with the support of U.S.conservatives, spoke of the "millions of Mexicans in the United States, who in cities such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami or San Francisco, inject the vitality of the Spanish language and of their cultural expression.... To continue speaking Spanish in the United States is to hacer patria"—to do one's patriotic duty.

Fox was thus describing Mexican immigrants in the U.S., not as people who had left Mexico and still had some sentimental connections there, as all immigrants do, but as carriers of the national mission of the Mexican nation into and inside the United States....

The Mexican invasion thus represents the ultimate self-realization of the Mexican people as they move onto a larger part of the world stage—namely the United States—than they have ever occupied before. But the migration, and the imperialism that celebrates it, do not in themselves constitute war. What makes illegal immigration war is the Mexican government's statements and actions about it, particularly with regard to the extraterritorial nature of the Mexican nation and its claims on the U.S. For years, Mexican presidents have routinely spoken of a Mexican nation that extends beyond that country's northern border into American territory. President Ernesto Zedillo told a 1994 convention of the radical-left Mexican-American lobbying group, the National Council of La Raza, "You are Mexicans too, you just live in the United States." One of Fox's cabinet officers, Juan Hernandez, has declared: "The Mexican population is 100 million in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States." These are not off-the-cuff statements, but formal state policy....

Such solidarity not only keeps Mexican-Americans sending remittances back to the home country, it makes them willing instruments of the Mexican government. Fox's national security adviser proposed the mobilization of Mexican-Americans as a tool of Mexican foreign policy, as reported by Allan Wall. The head of the Presidential Office for Mexicans Abroad said: "We are betting that the Mexican American population in the United States ... will think Mexico first."

The Fifth Column

Once the Mexican people have been defined as a nation that transcends the physical borders of the Republic of Mexico, and once Mexican-Americans are defined as "Mexicans" who are to be represented by the Mexican government, claims of "Mexican" sovereignty and rights can be made on their behalf against the country in which they reside. One such claim is to deny the authority of American law over them. Thus President Zedillo in 1997 denounced attempts by the United States to enforce its immigration laws, insisting that "we will not tolerate foreign forces dictating laws to Mexicans." [Italics added.] The "Mexicans" he was referring to were, of course, residents and citizens of the U.S., living under U.S. law. By saying that U.S. law does not apply to them, Zedillo was denying America’s sovereign power over its own territory....

Once we understand the cultural and national expansiveness that drives the Mexicans, the rest of their behavior falls into place. Consider Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda's non-negotiable demands—"It's the whole enchilada or nothing"—that he issued in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona in 2001. America, said Castañeda (as recounted by Allan Wall), "had to legalize all Mexican illegal aliens, loosen its already lax border enforcement, establish a guest worker program (during an economic downturn) and exempt Mexican immigrants from U.S. visa quotas!"...

Hitler pursued Anschluss, the joining together of the Germans in Austria with the Germans in Germany leading to the official annexation of Austria to Germany. The softer Mexican equivalent of this concept is acercamiento. The word means closer or warmer relations, yet it is also used in the sense of getting Mexican-Americans to act as a unified bloc to advance Mexico's political interests inside the U.S., particularly to help increase immigration and weaken U.S. immigration law. Using this epitome of “soft power,” the Mexican government is using the Mexican U.S. population, including its radical elements, as a fifth column....

Mexico's violations of our laws and sovereignty

How does Mexico carry out the strategy outlined above, pursuing its war by other means?

The Mexican government publishes a comic book-style booklet, Guía del Migrante Mexicano (Guide for the Mexican Migrant), on how to transgress the U.S. border safely...

While the Mexican government sends police to protect illegal border crossers against criminals, rogue Mexican soldiers protecting drug smugglers have threatened U.S. Border Patrol agents, even to the extent of engaging in shootouts....

A major role in Mexico's revanchist war against America is played by the Mexican consulates in the U.S., reports Heather Mac Donald. Now numbering 47 and increasing rapidly, they serve as the focal point of Mexico's fifth column. While Mexico’s foreign ministry distributes the Guía del Migrante Mexicano inside Mexico, Mexican consulates, unbelievably, distribute the guide to Mexican illegals inside the U.S.

After the U.S. became more concerned about illegal immigration after the 9/11 attack, the Mexican consulates were ordered to promote the matricula consular—a card that simply identifies the holder as a Mexican—as a way for illegals to obtain privileges that the U.S. usually reserves for legal residents....

Disseminating information about how to evade a host country’s laws is not typical consular activity.... Consuls aren’t supposed to connive in breaking a host country’s laws or intervene in its internal affairs.

The Mexican consulates actively campaign in U.S. elections on matters affecting illegal aliens. In November 2004, Arizona voters passed Proposition 200 [similar to Defend Colorado Now (http://www.DefendColoradoNow.org) ], which reaffirmed existing state law that requires proof of citizenship in order to vote and to receive welfare benefits. The Mexican consul general in Phoenix sent out press releases urging Hispanics to vote against it. After the law passed, Mexico’s foreign minister threatened to bring suit in international tribunals for this supposedly egregious human rights violation, and the Phoenix consulate supported the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s federal lawsuit against the proposition....

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