Latin America is collapsing. Are they taking the U.S. down with them?

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine,

...America is not going to Americanize the countries south of the border. Instead, America is being remade along a more Latin American model with radical politics, gang violence and a loss of civic confidence.

...Political instability, sharp swings from the far left to the far right, from Marxist terrorists to military warlords, are not a temporary aberration that can be fixed with our foreign aid or military intervention. They’re an enduring feature of political life that are as much a part of Latin America as the Declaration, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers are a part of the United States of America.

Political and civic institutions in Latin America are sources of instability. What little stability there is comes from the legal economy of oligarchs and the shadow economy of organized crime. The oligarchs work national economies and provide opportunities for educated professionals and trained workers. The crime lords, cartels and gangs offer security and economic opportunity for those nearer to the bottom.

...A century later the same Mexican workers that helped build California agriculture, decimated it by voting in Democrats whose environmental policies starved farms of water and strangled them with countless regulations. The workers have moved on to water-hungry cities where they don’t pick fruit, they provide services to a wealthy population of professionals, and then pass the bill to social services.

...Mexico began the great tradition of dumping its social problems in America over a century ago. These days it’s become an extremely profitable endeavor with billions in remittances pouring back in. Latin American countries export unskilled labor and gang members, and get back billions of dollars.

It’s a great deal for them. And a terrible deal for us.

Read more here.

Coming to America

Nina Lakhani reports at The Guardian that people from all over the globe

follow the well-trodden routes used by Latin Americans to reach the United States.

Over the past decade Colombia has become a major hub for non-Latin American migrants headed toward the United States because of its strategic position and abundance of criminal trafficking networks.

One US Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Colombia called the smuggling organizations along the route a “federation of independent operators” who hand groups of migrants off to each other, each charging for one leg of the journey.

The voyage from Asia or Africa to the US via these routes can cost as much as $12,000, Colombian investigators have found.

...Most often, smugglers tell migrants that if they are caught they should request refugee status. Once asylum is requested, authorities grant them a safe conduct pass for five days to present their case to the foreign ministry. Most never show. They use the reprieve to continue their journey northward.

...The number of migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa pale in comparison to Cubans who have chosen to take the land route to the United States rather than the traditional sea journey toward the Florida coast. The number of Cubans entering the US has surged since President Obama announced a renewal of diplomatic ties with the Caribbean country last December following more than 50 years as cold war enemies.

This recent exodus is promoted by fears that the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy – which fast-tracks legal residency for undocumented Cubans in the US as long as they arrive by air or overland – could soon come to an end.

Read more here.