The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - US Border Crossings: Is Mexico the Solution? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

It's time that we discuss the situation at the US - Mexico border. What's going on and how is it all going to shake out? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/us-border-crossings-is-mexico-the-solution

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Han Smoky, Colorado, where we're finally getting some much, much, much needed rain to put out the forest fires that are way, way, way too close. Anyway, I'm back for a couple days, so I do want to do an update. I want to talk a little bit about what's going on at the border. Now, as we all know, we had over 2 million people cross illegally last year, and whether that is good, bad or indifferent, of course, depends upon your politics. From a rule of law point of view, questionable at best, from a political point of view, untenable. from an economic point of view, if it hadn't happened, we'd probably have 10% inflation because of labor shortages. So, you know, pick your poison. Which problem do you want to embrace which problem do you want to work against? Anyway, this year, this month, now that we're getting into, what is it already, August?

Yeah. Okay. Two big things going on. First of all, the number of apprehensions on the border is steadily dropping has been for six months. And the reason is a package of items that Joe Biden enacted as executive orders a few months ago. These things are basically Samari expulsions, much stricter rules on things like asylum. They were all things that were part of a Republican-sponsored project early in this year to remake the border that was forced upon the Democrats. But then Donald Trump thought that this would be a victory for Joe Biden. So he told his allies in Congress to scuttle the deal.

And then Joe Biden went on and basically imposed a Republican ultimatum as a series of executive. orders, and I don't want to say it's working. It's too soon to know for sure, but we have definitely seen detentions at the border drop by roughly a third in that period of time, and so we're well below the high levels of where we were for detentions and crossings last year, and so far in July and August, we don't have full data, but preliminary suggests that that trend is continuing. That's piece one. Piece two is that folks from beyond Central America, remember that the majority of folks crossing the United States or from the failed

or nearly failed states of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. But there is a large and growing group that is coming from everywhere else, with India, Russia, and China especially being the big players. Basically, these are people that used to come to the United States legally,

but in the back and forth of election non-reformed through the Obama-Trump and now Biden years, basically all the legal pathways for immigrants have been closed. and so people are just coming illegally, which means different tools are being used to regulate the flow. Specifically, what Biden has done is he's had a series of deep conversations with his peer across the border in Mexico, Amlo, Lopez Obrador, the president, and has quietly behind the scenes cut a deal where Mexico will be actually the first line of defense.

So this makes it more difficult for people from those failed states to travel north. basically once they get to the northern border, they're put on buses and shipped back to the southern border. And second, the Mexicans are no longer accepting third-party visas for would-be immigrants who are coming from places like China. It used to be that you could fly from China to Mexico city and come up. Not anymore. Now they've been flying to places like Ecuador and coming up or trying to fly to Ecuador and then connecting through to Mexico. That doesn't work anymore. So now they're trying to go through Bolivia, which might still work at the moment. They've tried to go through Africa and connect, and now the Mexicans

are saying, unless you have a multi-year, multi-entry visa for all the countries on your trip, we're just going to ship you back, which means that all of the countries that they used to start in, places like Korea or Japan or Vietnam or Russia, are now having to take deportation flights from Mexico City. So none of this would have been possible if you can't have a conversation with Amlo.

And Amlo is a difficult guy to have a conversation with, just ask Donald Trump. He batted his head against the Mexican city administration for a couple of years early in the AMLO reign. It hasn't been any easier for Joe Biden. But after a fashion, we have a degree of a deal. Will it work? For the moment, things are trending in the positive direction if you want to keep the border closed. Just keep in mind that this border is 2,000 miles long.

And if the United States were to deploy its entire military to the border, that's only enough people for one dude every 50 feet assuming no one ever. takes a break or sleeps. So there has to be a political angle to any sort of border management. Simply building a wall won't work because, as we found it in the early years of the Trump administration, if you can quadruple your income by using the latter once, you do. And the wall actually has not done a great deal to inhibit people who would have crossed illegally. However, a political deal, as we saw between Trump and AMLO, as we're seeing now between Biden and AMLO, that turns all of Mexico into a kind of a wall, and that works a lot better. All right, that's it for me. Take care.