[Urbane Guerrilla]

The local paper called the immigration vote a "stinging rebuke" to Bush. I find it difficult to agree, though. I don't think any kind of lawmaking or legislation effective within the jurisdiction of the United States about Mexican illegals will have any palpable effect. This would only have amounted to a futile, albeit showy and noisy, tinkering at the margins -- an ineffectual treatment of the symptom of the real problem, which lies south of the Rio Grande, and the failure to achieve something ineffectual that doesn't strike at the root of the problem isn't going to sting for very long nor very deeply.

The real problem is that Mexico doesn't have a middle class to speak of, which problem stretches back all the way to the manner in which the Spanish colonized the place and has its origin therein.

Rather than the flood of numerous smallholders that came to North America and did good by doing well each in his own vineyard and fig tree, as it were, Mexico was sparsely colonized by Spanish aristocrats who set up a replication of the latifundial economy of medieval Spain. A major strategic mistake, socioeconomically speaking, though it is hard to imagine them doing anything but replicating that which they knew.

A horde of smallholders makes a middle class, and security of property rights makes a prosperous middle class. Property rights should be something pretty well sacred, and not dispensed with lightly, and perhaps not at all. Mexico's never been that solid about secure property rights -- the government can still confiscate, and too easily. A small cadre of aristocrats pursuing the traditional aristocrats' economy and its interest -- well, if this isn't the wellspring of every socioeconomic problem and the virulent symptoms that erupt like the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, then it sure is the source of the Panther's share -- "the Owl, as a boon/Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon."

Lacking a middle class's opportunities in their native countries, insinuating themselves into a society that actually has a middle class visible without magnification actually becomes a practicable solution for these huddling masses, and since Mexico's second-greatest source of foreign exchange is monetary remittances from inside the United States, it's a successful one too. The story is not too dissimilar elsewhere in Latin America, for the same problems are present, from the same origins.