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Mexico joins the United States...in the 1990s?


So this happened twice, and not something repeatedly revisited, and still can be explained as a general disgruntlement rather than a genuine grassroots political view that - as @Japhy pointed out - would've resulted in a political movement instead of being textbook trivia.

Mexico-US merger doesn't need to be a real-world plausible thing to be discussed, it can just be a blue-sky 'what if this happened'.
 

No, no, no you don't understand. Allowing 80 million Hispanic people to become citizens and have freedom of movement into the US is exactly the same as giving an island of 3 million statehood (which also hasn't happened yet and has very strong opposition on the mainland, but we're gonna pretend like it has for some reason) and giving amnesty but not citizenship to 3 million undocumented immigrants.

EDIT: Sort of like how voters are clearly okay with the President nuking China and starting WWIII, as evidenced by the fact that they're fine with him conducting drone strikes in nations that can't do anything to stop the US.
 
Most of the history between the two countries, so no. I can think of three specific timeframes where this nearly came to pass; the aforementioned 1848 episode, the 1910s during the spillover of the Mexican Revolution, and the 1980s/1990s scenario described here. I'll cover the Mexican Revolution one at a later date.

It's just that you keep saying there was a serious level of popular support in Mexico for annexation. And believing that this support was continuous would raise questions about why it never became a serious political force. But the notion that in fact it was only a consideration in three sporadic periods and there was still no serious political manifestation of it raises more for your argument.

I think you and I have very different definitions of 'nearly coming to pass' if you think that was ever true of the entirety of Mexico being absorbed by the US in the 1980s and 1990s btw. I wouldn't even apply 'nearly came to pass' to the much more realistic possibility of some of the northernmost provinces splitting off if Mexico had become destabalised. Even that's very much a stretch.

As other posters have said, you're taking polling which appeals to people's impulses for a better economic situation and reading too much into it. If you ask someone in Mexico 'Would you like more money and better living conditions if it means being a part of the US or moving there' then yeah, of course large numbers of people will say yes. It doesn't mean anything politically though. I bet a good number of the US posters in this thread would chose becoming Canadian in a poll if they were also, in the asking of their opinion on it, guaranteed that they'd have improved living standards and be personally better-off. Politically, it would mean nothing.
 
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As I noted they revisited the question later in the 1990s and got the same result. If you want other pollsters, how about Pew's 2005 poll that found 40% of Mexicans stated they would move to the United States if they could.

From what I can tell, the magazine did not do that but just basically republished their poll from early on, as a sort of retrospective-like thing. So no, they did not conduct the survey again. As for the Pew poll - just because some percentage of people wanted to move to the US if they could does not translate into annexationist sentiments; the two are very much different and generally, in the main, Mexicans preferred not to join the US politically. That bit, even during the darker days of the de la Madrid and Salinas administrations, means that if Mexico devolved into civil war, the last thing they would want is the US coming in to propping up the government - in fact, the US would probably be better treated with suspicion here (much like other times historically when the US intervened). With that in mind, that would mean the democrats would much refer to replace the 1917 Constitution with a new one to reflect the transition of power and keep Mexico a separate country instead of annexing it to the US (which would be political suicide).
 
The original statement I was responding to was that Mexicans, being a "Brown People" and Spanish speaking, would never be accepted. If that's the case, regardless of how long Puerto Rico has been in the United States, it should've been rejected and the 1986 Amnesty should've triggered the overthrow of Reagan. Neither came to pass and recently both the GOP and Democrats have endorsed Puerto Rican statehood in their official party platforms as a result of convincing public votes.

Talking about the "overthrow" of Reagan in or after 1986 in response to the immigration amnesty of that year is certainly evoking an extreme reaction. No one before you was talking about a coup, or talking about any lesser administration-ending catastrophe. Talk of annexation could simply be unpopular.

Compare, if you would, the extent to which Americans have historically been deeply reluctant to add Puerto Rico as a state; this island of American citizens where the main language is Spanish is even now often seen as too foreign (and, to be sure, too divided on the issue of statehood) to be admitted into the union. Expecting Americans to be more enthusiastic about adding Mexico to their country, keeping in mind the lack of any constitutional relationship between the two and the very substantial economic gaps between the two countries, is unrealistic.

Beyond this, there are notable differences between immigration—even substantial immigration—and annexation. Most notably, immigration does not involve the alteration of established political institutions and borders. Five million Mexicans moving to the US and assimilating into the labour market and the polity is a significant task, but it requires substantially fewer and less painful changes than making Baja California an American state.

As I noted they revisited the question later in the 1990s and got the same result. If you want other pollsters, how about Pew's 2005 poll that found 40% of Mexicans stated they would move to the United States if they could. We don't have to speculate whether any Mexican polling agency would do this because they literally did.

It is worth noting that the interest of individuals in emigration—even the interest of many individuals from a particular community in emigration—is not at all equivalent to an interest in annexing their home country to their destination country. Immigration is not an invasion (or alternatively, I belatedly add, a submission of a home territory to rule by the destination territory).
 
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So this happened twice, and not something repeatedly revisited, and still can be explained as a general disgruntlement rather than a genuine grassroots political view that - as @Japhy pointed out - would've resulted in a political movement instead of being textbook trivia.

Mexico-US merger doesn't need to be a real-world plausible thing to be discussed, it can just be a blue-sky 'what if this happened'.

If you did get some radical lowering of the barriers between Mexico and the United States—perhaps through the annexation of one to the other, perhaps through the creation of a new state, perhaps through simple EU-style supranational integration—my bet is that, while you would see significant gains in the medium run, the short run would be painful. No policing of migration coupled with a secure open frontier, for instance, might mean that you would get more Mexican migrants in the US but also more temporary migration.

I would also wonder about the fate of Mexican industry. If you did get an economic union akin to the German, might not the Mexican industries be priced out of existence just as East German ones were?
 
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I do think that, if you had some sort of regional integration mechanism akin to the one championed by Vicente Fox, with open borders as part of a Single Market-style project coupled with targeted investment and reforms in poorer areas of the bloc, this could work well. I had said elsewhere that the reforms that the post-Communist countries had to enact on joining the EU, and the EU institutions that existed and limited the range of politically possible but destructive things that they could do, might explain why these countries escaped the middle income trap but higher-income Latin American countries have not. Mexico could very plausibly have looked economically like Spain had things gone differently within my lifetime. Why could it not have done as well as Poland or Romania?

The key problem with this idea, as I noted above, is that the United States was deeply unenthusiastic about this sort of supranationalism. Mexico seems to have been interested in exploring this, and I can imagine Canada possibly being interested in this. For the United States, though, EU-style integration in North America seems to have become so popular that it quickly segued into the stuff of conspiracy theories. I would argue that the very idea is now politically poisonous. I would also argue that, especially inasmuch as a NAU would imply a level of supranational government with the ability to bind the US to its dictates, this would be likely to happen in most TLs like ours.

(The implications for the TL suggested by the OP are severe. Would Americans really be willing to countenance a much more thorough integration than a NAU, especially in a scenario where Mexico is doing worse than OTL?)
 
(The implications for the TL suggested by the OP are severe. Would Americans really be willing to countenance a much more thorough integration than a NAU, especially in a scenario where Mexico is doing worse than OTL?)

Let's put it this way - the OP's planned intervention in 1988 would be in the middle of a presidential election (Bush vs. Dukakis). If Reagan tried to pull this off, it would be greeted with massive opposition within the US (already angry with his Central American interventions, his failure to properly address South Africa, and Iran-Contra - among others), bringing back the scepter of a fear of another Vietnam-style conflict. So Mexico would sink Bush's campaign and push more of the momentum towards Dukakis (despite the whole "Zorba the Clerk" personality issues he had). Now, would a Dukakis Presidency coutenance doing much more for Mexico? I doubt it. In terms of international affairs, the Dukakis administration would be preoccupied elsewhere; as soon as there's stability, Dukakis would probably quietly withdraw American troops from Mexico and prefer to support the new democratic Mexican post-PRI transitional government (after, of course, apologizing on behalf of the US for the intervention). CUSFTA would be left alone, for the most part, though extending it to Mexico would be a non-starter (hence no NAFTA). Furthermore, considering the transitional government would likely be under PRD auspices (or, rather, the FDN, who along with the PAN would see its credibility increase in the case of a civil-war scenario because clearly the PRI cannot handle it), the Dukakis administration would have to be careful here that it not provoke Los Pinos too much. So North American integration, as such, would probably not be on the agenda; any non-military US action would just get funnelled through the UN and USAID. Now, Cardenas could pull a Felipe Gonzalez+Patricio Aylwin during his sexenio, and that would definitely be admirable, but considering who made up the FDN at the time, Mexico would also not pursue North American integration; in a civil war scenario, all that would matter is putting Mexico back on its feet after the disaster that was Miguel de la Madrid. There would be some symbolic acts, like nationalizing Televisa (and there was much rejoicing), but that's just stuff designed to wipe clean the PRI's legacy. Overall, though, both Cardenas and Dukakis would focus on other things, even if the latter wishes the former well.
 
So this happened twice, and not something repeatedly revisited, and still can be explained as a general disgruntlement rather than a genuine grassroots political view that - as @Japhy pointed out - would've resulted in a political movement instead of being textbook trivia.

Mexico-US merger doesn't need to be a real-world plausible thing to be discussed, it can just be a blue-sky 'what if this happened'.

If it happened twice, then it was repeatedly visited. If you take the position of it being disgruntlement, then the fact it was enduring should say a lot about the veracity of the feeling behind it, especially over the course of a decade. As for the distinction between becoming a political movement or not, why does that invalidate it? There's plenty of examples in the United States and other places of this, with serious feelings on the ground but that are not catered to by politicians or fail to congeal into a movement for various reasons.

It's just that you keep saying there was a serious level of popular support in Mexico for annexation. And believing that this support was continuous would raise questions about why it never became a serious political force. But the notion that in fact it was only a consideration in three sporadic periods and there was still no serious political manifestation of it raises more for your argument.

I think you and I have very different definitions of 'nearly coming to pass' if you think that was ever true of the entirety of Mexico being absorbed by the US in the 1980s and 1990s btw. I wouldn't even apply 'nearly came to pass' to the much more realistic possibility of some of the northernmost provinces splitting off if Mexico had become destabalised. Even that's very much a stretch.

As other posters have said, you're taking polling which appeals to people's impulses for a better economic situation and reading too much into it. If you ask someone in Mexico 'Would you like more money and better living conditions if it means being a part of the US or moving there' then yeah, of course large numbers of people will say yes. It doesn't mean anything politically though. I bet a good number of the US posters in this thread would chose becoming Canadian in a poll if they were also, in the asking of their opinion on it, guaranteed that they'd have improved living standards and be personally better-off. Politically, it would mean nothing.

I think you're misrepresenting the argument to attempt to bundle all three circumstances together, because that was not and never was the argument to argue there was always some underlying movement to annex Mexico throughout history. Instead, the circumstances behind each situation were unique to the times they were in, both in Mexico and in the United States. For the Mexican Revolution one I've mentioned, there is no indication there was support on the Mexican side and instead it would be a direct conquest. For this one, however, I'm able to cite there was an enduring and serious feeling on the side in this instance. I'm not even arguing there was an immediate or just barely waiting desire to be annexed, which is why I had to construct a scenario to create the circumstances for these feelings to be expressed.

From what I can tell, the magazine did not do that but just basically republished their poll from early on, as a sort of retrospective-like thing. So no, they did not conduct the survey again. As for the Pew poll - just because some percentage of people wanted to move to the US if they could does not translate into annexationist sentiments; the two are very much different and generally, in the main, Mexicans preferred not to join the US politically. That bit, even during the darker days of the de la Madrid and Salinas administrations, means that if Mexico devolved into civil war, the last thing they would want is the US coming in to propping up the government - in fact, the US would probably be better treated with suspicion here (much like other times historically when the US intervened). With that in mind, that would mean the democrats would much refer to replace the 1917 Constitution with a new one to reflect the transition of power and keep Mexico a separate country instead of annexing it to the US (which would be political suicide).

I have access to the polls in the Roper Center, they did ask it again as part of a survey to see how opinions had changed from the beginning of the 1990s to the end of that decade. As for Pew "some percentage" was 40% of Mexicans surveyed, it wasn't just a few off handed people but indicates a very large swathe did think like this. While it, in of itself, does not directly translate into annexationist sympathies, it does merge with them as an associated data point; if you're so opposed to the Americans, then why then would you want to move among them and be under their laws if you find it so odious? Now apply it to that context of 60% of Mexicans in two different polls saying exactly this when presented with the annexationist question directly.

Talking about the "overthrow" of Reagan in or after 1986 in response to the immigration amnesty of that year is certainly evoking an extreme reaction. No one before you was talking about a coup, or talking about any lesser administration-ending catastrophe. Talk of annexation could simply be unpopular.

The point about Reagan was in response to the point someone else made that Americans would overthrow any government that did this.

Compare, if you would, the extent to which Americans have historically been deeply reluctant to add Puerto Rico as a state; this island of American citizens where the main language is Spanish is even now often seen as too foreign (and, to be sure, too divided on the issue of statehood) to be admitted into the union. Expecting Americans to be more enthusiastic about adding Mexico to their country, keeping in mind the lack of any constitutional relationship between the two and the very substantial economic gaps between the two countries, is unrealistic.

I think you've kind of answered the question with Puerto Rico as to why it isn't a State yet; internal political debate on changing its status. Both political parties in the United States have in their official platforms the official endorsement of such and both have repeatedly backed the many votes on the issue of the past decade in an effort to resolve exactly this question.

Beyond this, there are notable differences between immigration—even substantial immigration—and annexation. Most notably, immigration does not involve the alteration of established political institutions and borders. Five million Mexicans moving to the US and assimilating into the labour market and the polity is a significant task, but it requires substantially fewer and less painful changes than making Baja California an American state.

Immigration into the United States has never altered political institutions? One I can immediately think of is how immigration into California fundamentally changed its political character, for example, and that's related to this topic.
 
I think you've kind of answered the question with Puerto Rico as to why it isn't a State yet; internal political debate on changing its status. Both political parties in the United States have in their official platforms the official endorsement of such and both have repeatedly backed the many votes on the issue of the past decade in an effort to resolve exactly this question.

I do not think that is an accurate representation. When I do a Google search with the keywords "Republicans" and "statehood" and "Puerto Rico", the top recent hits relate to Republicans being reluctant.


The above article notes how a Republican representative from Alaska has broken from a Republican consensus critical of Puerto Rican statehood, arguing that there is no reason to assume it must be Democratic-leaning.


This article notes how Republicans generally, if not uniformly, base their opposition to Puerto Rican statehood on fears that the state will learn Democratic.


This article notes how, in a poll, Democratic respondents consistently were twice as likely as Republicans to favour statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C.

The Republican Party might say it favours Puerto Rican statehood, but in actual fact its membership has demonstrated itself very reluctant. The unspoken but real subtext, of the Republican Party being skeptical about admitting to the Union a populous island full of Hispanics who can be expected to be Democratic-leaning, is real.

Immigration into the United States has never altered political institutions? One I can immediately think of is how immigration into California fundamentally changed its political character, for example, and that's related to this topic.

The self-marginalization of California Republicans because of their perception as a political faction hostile to California's single largest population is ephemeral. California has stayed republican in format, for instance, has remained a polity with competitive democratic elections and referenda, has kept key institutions of governance and law since the state's foundation, and so on. Immigration has not changed that; California's institutions, if anything, have provided a matrix for immigrant integration.

The massive annexations of Mexican territory that you are talking about are wholly different. If Republicans are reluctant to bring into the Union a Puerto Rico already deeply integrated into the US, with millions of American citizens and a high-income economy, how much less likely will Republicans—even Democrats—be to bring into the US much poorer and more populous states with no history of deep integration?
 
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The difference between Mexico and the United States is even larger than the difference between the GDR and FRG. Mexico is twice as populous and half as wealthy in relative terms as the GDR was relative to the FRG. It's much closer to a merger between the DPRK and RoK, except at least the two Koreas have a similar language and culture (there has been drift in the decades since separation).
 
^ I think that comparison does a disservice to Mexico. Unlike the GDR, never mind the DPRK, Mexico now and in the 1980s was a noteworthy power, an industrialized upper-middle income country with a diversified economy and an open political system (if not one that was democratic until the 1990s). Mexico, in an international comparison, actually looks good; it simply has the bad luck to lie next to a much larger US that is the richest country on the planet.

The big difference between the US-Mexico pair and the FRG-GDR and ROK-DPRK pairs is that Americans and Mexicans do not think of themselves as constituting a divided nation. Frankly, it has been hard to try to create an enduring close partnership between the two.
 
^ I think that comparison does a disservice to Mexico. Unlike the GDR, never mind the DPRK, Mexico now and in the 1980s was a noteworthy power, an industrialized upper-middle income country with a diversified economy and an open political system (if not one that was democratic until the 1990s). Mexico, in an international comparison, actually looks good; it simply has the bad luck to lie next to a much larger US that is the richest country on the planet.

The big difference between the US-Mexico pair and the FRG-GDR and ROK-DPRK pairs is that Americans and Mexicans do not think of themselves as constituting a divided nation. Frankly, it has been hard to try to create an enduring close partnership between the two.

When it comes to people and economics the relative comparisons have always been important, especially when cultural differences are present. Mexico and Eastern Europe might be well off in a global sense, but they still aren't as well off as the United States and Western Europe. The fact that Mexico and Eastern Europe are well off in a global sense means that they attract migrants in their own right.

There are many international organizations and countries experiencing significant tension despite having more economic and cultural similarity than the United States and Mexico. If people can't agree on a European or a British identity I don't see how two countries with no history of being unified can have a merger without something bubbling over.
 
That's a lot of words written on the basis of a magazine poll.

You know what words don't appear? 'Racism.' 'Discrimination.' 'Bigotry.' 'Prejudice.' Or, for that matter, 'Spanish' or 'Language.'

Leaving aside the incredibly generous dismissal of Mexican nationalism, any idea that an American president and their party would survive a month in office after floating the idea of giving tens of millions of non-white, non-english speaking people citizenship- while rebuilding the country after a civil war, apparently!- is ludicrous.

Technically, depending on the point of their term, they could last more than a month. This is a technicality because the whole premise is implausible, though.
 
When it comes to people and economics the relative comparisons have always been important, especially when cultural differences are present. Mexico and Eastern Europe might be well off in a global sense, but they still aren't as well off as the United States and Western Europe. The fact that Mexico and Eastern Europe are well off in a global sense means that they attract migrants in their own right.

This is true, but the comparisons of Mexico with East Germany never mind North Korea overlook the fundamental differences. Those countries did (or would) have to make fundamental political transitions, changing over their basic ideologies and transforming utterly their systems of government.
With Mexico, well, the country is poor. In other respects, it is pretty similar to the US.

There are many international organizations and countries experiencing significant tension despite having more economic and cultural similarity than the United States and Mexico. If people can't agree on a European or a British identity I don't see how two countries with no history of being unified can have a merger without something bubbling over.

Agreed. I am inclined to think supranational integration rather more workable than a takeover of one country by another.
 
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