It surprises me how much Americans don't understand how deeply the cartel is in every transaction. Yes, sending money to Grandma to pay for a car is funding the cartel who probably got paid to make the car available. Grandma may even pay small direct bribes to the cartel just to be able to live her life.
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
I think it's possible, but pretty difficult. There's just too much money to be made selling drugs to the US.
A safe and prosperous Mexico would be a huge advantage to America. We should be investing a lot more into this.
>Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution)
Indeed, it is not.
But not for lack of trying. The biggest migration in history is the 10% of Mexico that has moved to the US since 1970. <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1trqnn8/he...>
As of 2024, 11 million Mexican-born people live in the US. <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>
What you're suggesting is that all Mexicans suffer more because some money may somehow end up in the hands of the cartel. And that, for some reason, the US should help do this. That's absurd.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.