Do You Hear That Sucking Sound?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And the core of the problem still is not in the United States: the core of the problem is that Mexico lacks a middle class visible to the naked eye. No way up -- unless you go north.

Should they remove every factor in their sociopolitical environment that militates against a vibrant middle class, Mexico will become a great and wealthy place to live, work, and raise families. However, we'd have to go back and undo about everything from circa 1521 AD to get that: unlike North America, colonized almost entirely by a horde of smallholders, each with a stake in growing his little patch, Mexico's colonization was by a sparse sprinkle of aristocrats, who knew only one economic model: large landholding, which model they operated under. There's hardly a better way to ensure that you have a small percentage of major landholders -- and a propertyless class of laborers without prospects of being anything but laborers.

That's an awfully big job -- but it would make "our" illegal-immigrant problem go away permanently.