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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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The number of Americans living in Mexico surged by 75 percent last year compared to 2019. The Los Angeles Times reports that this has angered locals, who are “fed up” with Americans coming to their country, speaking a foreign language, raising rents, and displacing their culture. For these Mexicans complaining about being replaced, I am playing the world’s smallest violin.

While this guy apparently just dislikes Mexicans, I've seen American rightists go like "Mexicans hate Americans immigrating to Mexico when THEY are the ones immigrating to America?" and I've never quite understood the point - the Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they? (Well, they might have done it at one point, or might do it at some point, but at that moment they're obviously not invading the USA or whatever).

Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they?

No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are, and they are benefitting from the nearly $60 billion in remittances sent home annually by those expats - roughly 4% of Mexico's entire GDP.

Quite. The Mexicans in Mexico are the ones puppeteering the Mexicans in the USA: "Go to El Norte and send us some money" style. So yeah, they are invading the USA, in the same way that George Bush was invading Iraq - he isn't personally the boots on the ground, but the boots on the ground wouldn't have been there if he didn't direct them.

Uh, the recent migrants have mostly not been from Mexico.

Is there no real difference between these two invasions? Something that might make it nonsensical to use the word "invasion" to describe both? Like the fact that Bush invaded using tanks and missiles and the Mexicans are "invading" by getting jobs?

Some (me) would say the Iraqi one is much more benign because that invasion didn't leave millions of American-Iraqui colonists / anchor-babies there to cause further demographic and political disruption in perpetuity.

Yes, those millions of children who will mostly attempt to earn their living and keep their heads down are much worse of a scourge than the trajectory Iraq was on since 2003. Clearly.

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