Thanks to Joe Biden, Mexico could soon suffer collapse and become more of a failed state than it currently is. Mexico already struggles to battle the cartels that dominate the drug and human trafficking trades on its soil. Joe Biden’s policies are not helping. In fact, he’s delivering a financial shot in the arm to the criminal gangs.
I touched on this in Monday’s post about Joe Biden’s hypocrisy with respect to states, COVID lockdowns, Americans’ civil liberties, and the border. Simply put, Biden says he wants Americans to go back under lockdown (or at least pause reopening) while at the same time he is allowing thousands to cross illegally into the country every day. Some of them are testing positive for COVID but they are not being restricted for travel. Biden is also looking at imposing a “vaccine passport” on Americans, while he would impose no such restriction on illegal migrants, who are not even being tracked as they move about within the United States.
(Remember this if any of the border states, especially Arizona and Texas, see rises in COVID cases. Democrats and the media will undoubtedly blame any such rise on the states’ Republican governors for reopening. But the unfettered COVID-positive illegal immigration into those states will surely have some effect. It would be anti-science to assert that they will not.)
According to numerous reports, the Mexican drug cartels are facilitating the ongoing illegal migration by the thousands. They are, according to numerous reports, charging an average of $6,000 per person to get them to and across the border. Setting the cartels’ own violent nature aside for the moment, this is a high-profit business for them. I’m going to keep this high level to stay focused on the numbers. The cartels are not monolithic and they do fight among themselves for territory and trade. Their chief enemy is the Mexican state.
According to the latest numbers, as many as 180,000 migrants illegally crossed the border each month in 2021 so far (about 6,000 per day). Let’s be more conservative and say it’s 125,000, as some estimate. Assuming this number is accurate (it may be wildly underreporting the true number, according to Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels), the cartels could have grossed $750,000,000 in that month ($6,000 x 125,000). Assuming the 125,000 crossing rate stays consistent, over the course of this year alone, the cartels could gross $9 billion just from illegal crossings ($750 million x 12). They also have their multi-billion dollar drug trade ongoing. Again, that’s taking the more conservative number of illegal crossings. It could be 180,000 per month, or even three times that.
A gross of $9 billion stands up well against Mexico’s entire military and police budgets combined.
In 2020, Mexico spent about $6.54 billion on its military according to Statista.
In 2020, Mexico spent about $9.4 billion on total law enforcement according to Statista (after converting pesos to dollars at current exchange rates).
Added together, Mexico spends about $16 billion on military and law enforcement. The cartels will have a new fund of about $9 billion gross, plus their already active drug trade, which has been valued at about $64 billion in 2017.
The cartels could have as much as $73 billion gross to work with this year, up against about $16 billion for the Mexican government. The cartels already enjoy a heavy financial advantage over the nation they’re parasitically destroying from within. Adding billions more will only make it worse. Some of the trafficking revenue will of course fund drug lords’ lavish lifestyles, but they will undoubtedly invest in weapons, intelligence, bribery, transportation (these huge numbers of migrants cannot all be walking across Mexico), and other ways to strengthen themselves and bolster their illegal activities.
This is a recipe for extreme instability which would put Mexico on a fast path to becoming even more of a failed state than it already is.
The billions the cartels are hauling in from human trafficking across the border are a direct result of Joe Biden’s policies and posturing. Joe Biden is putting Mexico on a path to collapse.
The consequences for Mexico collapsing, which shares 1,954 miles of border with the United States including its two most populous states, could be catastrophic on both sides of the border. The migrant crisis that is happening now could become a true refugee crisis. States and municipalities which are already struggling under the weight of the current flow might themselves face the threat of collapse. The national security and humanitarian implications would become tragic in scale. AOC and her America-hating ilk will continue to blame America first, and in this case, they would accidentally be right (but for the wrong reasons): Joe Biden’s policies will have led directly to the collapse of Mexico.