Marietta Daily Journal
Editorial: Open Borders?
May 14, 2009
Should the United States be poorer and Mexico wealthier? You don’t have to read too far between the lines to know that’s what ex-Mexican President Vicente Fox was arguing for on Tuesday at a forum sponsored by Kennesaw State University and the Commission on North American Prosperity, aka North America 2050.
First, we’ll stipulate that most U.S. residents would overwhelmingly agree that our country does not need to be poorer, and that Mexicans would probably agree by similar margins that their country should be wealthier. Who wouldn’t want their country to be wealthier, after all?
Second, we’ll agree that there are steps that can and probably should be taken to make the flow of goods and yes, people, more efficient between our country and our closest neighbors. Steps that would make each country a more attractive trading partner, while yet safeguarding jobs; and steps that would provide a more orderly, better regulated and much safer flow of labor between the countries.
Yet we doubt many Americans would favor formal agreements with Mexico or Canada, or any other country for that matter, that would tend to undermine our economic health just in order to raise the standard of living in those countries. And we don’t think many would agree that the elimination of all immigration laws and the “pooling” of sovereignty among our country, Canada, Mexico and our other neighbors to the south is the key to a bright future.
That, however, is what the Commission on North American Prosperity is all about.
“My desire is that there will be no borders” between the countries, he admitted. His goal is something similar to the European Union, a gigantic North American entity within which people and goods move freely and much more of the wealth and power flows southward,” Fox said at KSU.
“I want a better future for North America,” he told the crowd. “(The) dreams of our founding fathers will be fulfilled with freedom and better distribution of wealth.”
Sorry, but Karl Marx was not one of our founding fathers, regardless of what Mr. Fox might think. And James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the other founders who labored to craft the U.S. Constitution did so not with the aim of a creating an all-powerful central government, or one that goes out of its way to penalize hard work, initiative and creativity just in order to “spread the wealth around.”
Fox touted how each country in the EU contributes 2 percent of its gross national product for investment in “underdeveloped areas and poor families.” Well the fact is, by the time one adds up the billions that U.S. taxpayers already shell out to help poor people here at home courtesy of welfare, housing assistance, food stamps and myriad other services; and the billions more we fork over to underwrite the bulk of the budgets for the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other such organizations whose primary goals include helping develop downtrodden areas of the world; we are already paying well in excess of that 2 percent. In fact, it might be a better bargain for U.S. taxpayers to try things Fox’s way.
In all fairness to President Fox, there are plenty of those on this side of the border, many of them in high places in Washington and elsewhere, who are just as ardent in their support of an open-borders, “pooled sovereignty” version of North America as he is.
But we suspect that the more most Americans learn about the idea, the less they’ll like it. And rightly so.
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