Neighbors Should Put Pride Aside

While I was kicking around Mexico to learn more about who comes north and why, I missed a big story back home. The U.S. Border Patrol was rounding up illegal immigrants in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Critics screamed in protest because the Border Patrol had previously kept its posse closer to the border. Defenders shot back that illegal means illegal, period.

Both sides had a point, but no one was converted. The nation’s hypocritical immigration enforcement remained unchanged, and as goofy as ever.

Now we’ve got Congress demanding an investigation of the arrests, not because they were illegal, but because they weren’t approved by the Department of Homeland Security.

“It’s maddening,” said David Ayon, a Loyola Marymount researcher. “We just don’t know what to do about this border.”

Truer words do not exist. It’s 2,000 miles of conflicting sentiment and special interests, gold on one side, dirt on the other. Throw in election-year grandstanding, and you end up with Congress demanding to know why a federal agency was doing its job.

Schizophrenia reigns.

In the United States, we’ve decided that an illegal immigrant can legally go to school or to the county hospital, and in California, he may soon have a driver’s license. But he can still be arrested for walking down the street.

We’ll chase immigrants to their death in the scorching deserts of California and Arizona, but we don’t enforce sanctions against employers who hire illegals.

We’re sinking billions into Iraq, but tossing peanuts at our amigos down south.

If I learned anything while exploring Mexico, it’s that cat-and-mouse games are useless without an overhaul of policies on both sides of the border.

In the half-abandoned Mexican farm town of San Juan Atenco, I learned that a farmer can’t get bank credit, can’t get government assistance for basic supplies and can’t survive. So local campesinos risk their lives, and spend a year’s wages, to go north in search of work.

Loyola’s Ayon notes that U.S. aid to Mexico is $30 million a year, which isn’t enough to shovel out the barn each day. But Mexico shares the blame for that paltry amount, Ayon said. It’s too proud to ask for more, and it doesn’t want money that comes with neighborly obligations.

The Mexican government doesn’t seem to have a problem, however, with the estimated $12 billion that migrants send home each year from the United States.

But Bob Pastor, professor of international relations at American University, says the so-called remittances are empty calories for a starved patient.

“Nobody calls them by their right term,” Pastor said. “They are welfare payments to dependent families for the sole purpose of consumption. They are not for investment, and this doesn’t really help Mexico.... Welfare is not a future.”

Pastor, national security advisor for Latin America during the Carter administration, sees only one solution.

Mexico, the United States and Canada share a continent, and they share a fate. What they need, he argues, is a relationship that better serves each of them, improving on the North American Free Trade Agreement and stealing the best aspects of the European Union.

People don’t come north from Mexico for work, Pastor says. They come north because of the wage gap, which is so huge there’s no fence high enough to stop people from trading $6 a day for $6 an hour. A dozen Border Patrol officers running around the Inland Empire are no match for that kind of motivation.

You want to turn back illegal immigration? Pastor asks.

Develop the Mexican economy.

Under his proposal, the U.S. would contribute $9 billion annually to a development fund for Mexico -- chicken feed when compared to the tab in Iraq -- and Canada would kick in another $1 billion.

But this doesn’t mean Christmas comes early.

If Mexico wants our tax dollars, they’ll have to add $10 billion of their own to the development kitty. Raising that kind of money would mean taking an honest run at corruption, cracking down on murderous drug lords and collecting taxes for a change.

“There are several reasons why we should do this,” Pastor says. “First and most important is that Mexico’s development is in our economic interest. It’s also in our humanitarian interest. And over the long term, it’s the only way to deal with immigration.”

Steve Lopez writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at steve.lopez @latimes.com.