How can Trump stem the flow of migrants into USA?

Image via BBC News

President Trump's inhumane separation of Mexican children from their parents has caused an international outcry that has forced him to back down, but he is still obsessed with the idea of building a wall to keep out Mexican war refugees.

"Migrants" is the term preferred by the mass media, but most are in fact refugees from the Mexican Drug war, one of the four major wars  currently burning on the surface of our planet. It has killed at least 106,000 people so far, with 27,000 classified as missing, and the fatalities are increasing year on year. About one Mexican in every thousand has been killed. Drug related killings have been going on in Mexico for decades, but the Mexican Government intervened officially in 2006 with the aim of reducing violence. Instead, violence has increased, because when the Government arrests a drug cartel leader, other groups move in to the vacuum so created.

The Mexican Drug War is the driver of the migration that Trump and his supporters are so very concerned about. The present strategy is failing and involves unacceptable inhumanity. The Wall solution is ridiculous. So what is the solution?

The solution is to decriminalise cannabis and cocaine, because this is what the criminal gangs are fighting over.

Legalisation of cannabis is now uncontroversial to any rational mind. Canada and Uruguay are the first two countries to legalise it for recreational use, and the argument for  legalisation for medicinal use so overwhelmingly strong that even the our dishevelled Tory Government in England is reluctantly shuffling towards that goal.

Legalisation of cocaine is slightly more controversial and unfamiliar, partly because it is associated with very bad social conditions in the production and distribution lines. However, these harms are related to the fact that it is in the hands of criminals. Legalisation will convert criminal cartels into regulated commercial corporations. Corporations are not of course immune from criminal actions, but at least in the main they do not indulge in overt killing wars.

So we have a reasonable, humane solution to the Mexican Drug War and therefore to the perceived problem of Mexican migration into the USA.



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