President Obama will make a stop in Mexico City today, the first presidential visit to the hemisphere’s largest metropolis since the early 1990s. He’ll meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and the topic will be what I’m calling the NAFTA black triangle: Mexico gives us drugs and cheap labor, while the States sends back loads of guns and assault weapons.

I’ve been listening to various interviews lately regarding the drug wars in Mexico. One was on 60 Minutes, in which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointedly did not rule out sending the U.S. military to the U.S.-Mexico border. Another was an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, with Alejandro Junco de La Vega, head of influential newspaper chain Grupo Reforma. He expressed deep concerns that the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans involved in the drug trade would permeate any number of civil institutions, not just the courts, local government and law enforcement, but also the business community, the media and electoral systems.

Regarded from a historical point of view, Mexico’s problem looks something like this: U.S. success in shutting down the Caribbean drug route (the “Miami Vice” and “Scarface” paradigm) has led much of that trade to re-route through Mexico. The Colombian cartels’ retrenchment and fragmentation in the face of intense U.S. and Colombian military pressure over the last two decades has created network-building opportunities for the Mexican cartels, whose operations have proliferated all over the hemisphere. Meanwhile, the exponentially growing volume of cross-border legal trade in the wake of the NAFTA agreement signed in 1994 means more opportunities to piggy-back black market cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Couple these trends with a low-income rural population that has continuously abandoned Mexico’s fields for cities in the last few decades, and you have all the ingredients for what’s being seen now: drug armies battling one another savagely for turf and profits.

Mayors, police chiefs, gadfly reporters—they’re not necessarily the real targets, but drug lords aren’t shy about removing them if they get in the way. President Calderon’s militarized war on the cartels only turns up the heat. Civilians caught in the crossfire suffer. With U.S. border states acting like open-air gun bazaars for the Mexican cartels, it’s no surprise Mexico’s diplomatic strategy in this mess is to displace some of the responsibility northwards. As Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said in a recent interview with the Arizona Republic: “For Mexico, the Number 1 priority is guns. The Number 2 priority is guns. The Number 3 priority is guns.”

But there’s another aspect to Mexico’s dilemma that isn’t noted. It’s immigration. If it’s linked to the drug wars it’s usually only by xenophobes who say illegal immigration provides channels for drug traffickers to enter the United States and wreak damage. However, I would make a different argument: it’s in part restrictive U.S. immigration policies that fuel Mexico’s drug wars. If illegal immigrant populations in the United States shelter Mexican criminals, it’s in part because inadequately narrow legal channels for immigration have created a massive shadow population of undocumented immigrants in the United States that today stands at 11.6 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The majority is Mexican.

If this population were brought out of the murk of illegality and somehow normalized, havens for drug traffickers would dry up, they’d have less places to hide, less of an underground network to move within. Also, the opportunity to immigrate legally to the United States as a guest worker, farm worker or special laborer within certain industries would provide a channel for hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to gain honest livelihoods. It would be an alternative to the drug economy. So here’s one partial solution to the border drug wars: open up the gates and allow more humans through. If that happens less drugs will flow northward and less guns southward. And perhaps less dead bodies will pile up in Mexico.

Via The Americanistas