Pushing and Pulling

The tendency in America is to look at the world as if everything is reflected in our belly buttons. It's all internal to us, in our mind the rest of the world defines themselves in comparison to us.

Of course that's not really the way the rest of the world looks at things, they, like us, tend to look at themselves as the center of the universe. It's human nature, but for some reason Americans tend to just understand that we aren't the only people who think of ourselves as central. That's why we can't solve the Mexican immigration problems.

Theory of Migration proposes two kinds of factors creating migration -- push and pull. There's characteristics of Mexico that cause people to want to leave, pushes them, and then characteristics of the US that pulls them here. There are push forces in Mexico that make leaving a strong motivation for a poor Mexican trying to support a family. And as all the TV talking heads keep telling us, there are forces in the US that have a strong pull force on those Mexicans, drawing them to us.

There is no strong pull into Guatamalo, pretty much their only other option if they're going to leave.

So there's nothing we can do to keep them out by just trying to reduce pull forces here. They will come because they can't find an alternative. We can make it really hard for them. But they're still going to come.

Years ago Mexicans would come over, make a little money, go home, come back, go back and forth. They'd work here months at a time, but they lived in Mexico, had a family in Mexico. We wanted to stop that. So, we made it harder for them to go back and forth. So now they bring their family, and just stay, because once they get here they know it will be hard to get back here if they visit Mexico.

If we really want to do something about immigration from Mexico we need to do something to fix those push factors in Mexico that will just keeping pushing them right into the bayonets of those soldiers on the border.

Anybody have an thoughts on this?