Mexico—Friend, Enemy, Neutral, or Something Else?

January 30, 2025 by Victor Davis Hanson

After years of U.S. appeasement, Mexico exploits open borders, drug trade, and remittances—it's time for America to enforce real consequences and reclaim control.

Mexican nationals, likely cartel members, recently crossed the border and shot and wounded an American hiker. Did they assume that Joe Biden was still president, and so it was still a veritable open season on Americans without consequences?

Mexico also recently balked at allowing a U.S. transport plane to land, returning its own nationals apprehended as illegal aliens.

Was its attitude that Alejandro Mayorkas was still Homeland Security Secretary and thus working with Mexico to ensure that millions of illegal aliens could stay in the U.S. indefinitely?

After four years of Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into the U.S. and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.

Mexico either cannot or will not address the billions of dollars of raw fentanyl products shipped in—mostly from China—and then processed for export to the U.S. by its cartels across a nonexistent border.

Mexico seems to have little concern that some 75,000 Americans on average die from mostly Mexican-imported fentanyl each year—more deaths in just the last decade than all the Americans killed in action during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Who then is our friend, and who is our enemy?

This appalling death toll is in part due to the deliberate efforts of the cartels to mask fentanyl as less deadly narcotics or camouflage the poison by lacing it into counterfeit prescription drugs.

Mexico encourages its expatriate illegal aliens to send back some $63 billion per year in remittances. That huge sum constitutes one of Mexico’s largest sources of foreign exchange, surpassing even its tourist and oil revenues.

These billions are often subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. America’s local, state, and federal governments provide billions of dollars in food, housing, and health care entitlements that allow Mexico’s citizens, illegally residing inside the U.S., to free up the cash to be sent home.

According to U.S. census data, almost every year, the trade deficit with Mexico has increased from about $50 billion twenty years ago to $160 billion today.

That astronomical figure neither includes the $63 billion American outflow in remittances nor the multi-billion income from the cartels’ illicit drug sales in the U.S.

Although one would never know it from the rhetoric of Mexican politicians, the entire Mexican economy, both legal and illicit, hinges on America accepting a worsening asymmetrical relationship.

Yet the U.S. has a lot of leverage with Mexico to ensure that it no longer assumes a permanent huge trade surplus with the U.S., turns a blind eye to massive fentanyl shipments that kill thousands of Americans, encourages its own citizens to enter their neighbor’s country illegally, and counts on massive cash remittances from the U.S.

Loud rhetoric, threats, and ultimatums do not work.

Usually, they earn Mexico’s furious retorts about Yanqui imperialism and ancient bitterness about a lost Aztlán.

Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador used to brag about the millions of illegal aliens that were residing in the U.S. He further advised expatriate Mexican-Americans not to vote for Republicans, whom he felt one day might close the border.

Obrador rarely reflected on why millions of his own citizens were fleeing his own country—only that it was a “beautiful” thing that they did.

Did Obrador hate Trump more for challenging him by trying to stop the illegal influx or Biden for embarrassing him by welcoming millions of them into the U.S.?

So, what should be the U.S. response to Mexico’s passive-aggressive policies?

Smile, praise Mexico as our greatest trading partner, and then quietly inform them that illegal aliens will be bussed to the border.

Once there, they could be given a generous care package, escorted through a border door, and left on the Mexican side from which they entered and thus could then be escorted in caravans home in the same manner that they arrived.

To maintain cordial relations and politely gain Mexico’s attention, we need a radical change in tone and action beyond just ending catch-and-release, finishing the wall, and making refugee status requests possible only in the home country of the applicant.

Rather than worry about who is sending remittances, why not politely place a 20 percent tax (about $12 billion) on all cash sent from the U.S. to Mexico?

We could also hail our mutual friendship and then reluctantly slap tariffs on imported assembled goods until the two-way trade is roughly balanced.

Who knows, once the U.S. is respected again and not considered an easy mark, Mexico could once again become a fine and reciprocal friend to the United States.