Kitchen table discussion on the drug cartels in Mexico

Today I had a kitchen table discussion with Mom and Roy about immigration. Lately, I’ve been trying to avoid these, mostly because I feel like there’s not much actual exchange of information and insight, but tons of entrenched positions. This discussion, however, was reasonably good and provided some interesting thoughts.


Some highlights:

I think one of the reasons why immigration has gotten A LOT harder to talk about is because it has been conflated with national security. Specifically, Americans are scared of the drug violence in Mexico. So I think that needs ot be tackled before immigration policy becomes politically tractable.



As other observers have highlighted, overall crime has steadily decreased over the last 15 years everywhere, including border states (with the possible exception of kidnapping). Possible reasons include a growing prison population (maybe we’re arresting the “bad” ones), access to abortion (favored by Freakanomics and creepy Social Darwinists) , or the proliferation of TV programming (why shoot someone when you can watch America’s Got Talent?).

However, the fact remains that Americans on the border are scared out of their minds by the images and stories coming out of the drug wars in Mexico. And indeed, it looks terrible right now.

So, in order to deal with immigration in a reasonably sane way that it politically possible, it might be necessary to tackle the violence and drug trafficking across the border first.

I remember a presentation at Cornell in the Peace Studies Program about four years ago, when the stories were just beginning to break about the problems in Northern Mexico. The presenter pointed out that the drugs flow north, and cash flows south. One thing that did surprise me is that weapons also flow south.

In other words, many of the assault rifles used by the drug cartels in their battles against the Mexican army and police forces come from the United States.

How to stop this? I don’t know – but maybe some creative solutions are in order. It might be possible to combine restrictions on assault rifles with some sort of GPS locators to monitor the flow of weapons. I’m sure that this will run afoul of gun advocates, but I think with enough careful consideration it would be possible to do something that wouldn’t infringe upon Second Amendment rights but would help reduce the flow of arms south of the border.

Because of penetration within the Mexican army and police forces, it might also be necessary for the CIA to provide special forces and training to their Mexican counterpart. To be honest, I’d be surprised if that wasn’t currently happening – though it could be that resources required in Afghanistan and elsewhere are complicating the effort. Again, because of penetration and intimidation, it might be counterproductive to simply supply the regular army and police with funds and hardware.

Finally, the issue of money. I recall a news story about the Arizona state Attorney General fighting with Western Union for information about cross-border transactions. This seems to be a clear-cut case for Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to compel Western Union to provide any and all information that would be helpful for monitoring, if not directly restricting, the transfer of funds to the drug cartels. Western Union would lose a few million in transaction fees – but I think most of us can live with that if it means shutting down the funding of the drug cartels.(Update 9/17/10: the issue appears to have been somewhat resolved by a settlement of $21 million and a $50 million commitment to an agency to the Center for State Enforcement of Antitrust and Consumer Protection Laws, Inc.)



I know none of this is as easy as it sounds, but it helped me clarify some of my thoughts about this issue that I don’t spend much time thinking about, but probably will come up in conversations in the coming months and years. None of these will completely cripple the drug cartels – but it’s a no-brainer that everything should be done to make their lives more difficult.

Your thoughts would be welcome.