The ENTIRE point of helping other people with their problems is to put a stop to the problems.
If we stop making life harder for Mexicans living in the already dry northern part of Mexico, maybe they stop pouring over the border and dying in our deserts
We could also institute a work visa for Mexicans who want to work here but not live here.
Plenty of Mexicans want to work here part of the year and take their relatively high American wages home to Mexico to live. They don't want to move here
I read an article years ago about a guy doing construction work six months a year here and sending most of his money home. He spent six months a year unemployed enjoying life in Mexico with the wife and kids and six months a year earning a lot more than he could in Mexico.
His only beef was he couldn't do that legally.
That's it.
And like some comedian joked about, illegal immigrants aren't taking our jobs. They are taking jobs we don't fucking WANT.
Construction companies have trouble getting enough young white men to fill their crew. They hire illegals because it's the only way to get the job done
It's not rewarding them for bad behavior. It's fixing the problem causing bad behavior
AND it potentially prevents a future war with Mexico.
Right now assholes like Trump are pissed that people are willing to risk dying in the desert for a better life. At some point Mexico may decide to make Americans die for our asshole behavior.
If Mexicans are dying anyway over this shit, why not in uniform and for a goal that might fix this shit?
I would like a peaceable solution before they hit that point
The US is wealthier than Mexico. That is tied in part to better average education level.
Instead of being dicks about this and rather than falling for the problematic answer of "we should GIVE them resources", we can invest resources in figuring it the fuck out and helping them find technical solutions.
But if only for ecological reasons, we should be finding ways to stop draining the Colorado River.
The mouth of the river has been ecologically changed by that practice. Aka damaged.
The Salton Sea was expected to dry up. It's a periodic lake that Indigenous peoples had stories about from their ancestors and it was dry when Europeans arrived.
Then an incident involving the Colorado River filled it again and it was expected to dry up sometime last century but agricultural runoff keeps supplying it with enough water to prevent that.
We grow a lot of almonds in California. I love almonds but it's a tree that needs a lot of water being grown in the desert because they strip mine the Colorado River of water.
Agriculture uses a lot more water in California than residential development does but all they harp on is trying to cut residential use.
Meanwhile when I lived on a military base in the High Fesert, I couldn't leave cactus behind that I had planted in my backyard but was REQUIRED to maintain the grass in the backyard while I lived there.
And Nevada has golf courses.
You have any idea how hard it is to keep grass alive in 115 degree heat and 6 inches of annual rain where shrimp hatch out in the dry lake beds when you get an inch or two of rain that makes them actual lakes for a few weeks?
Our yard wasn't too bad. Our neighbor in the same duplex got more sunlight during the hottest part of the day and replanted his grass repeatedly. He couldn't keep it alive.
It's free. You go get sod or grass seed by flashing your ID. But it's a time and energy burden and it's environmental idiocy.
I may have started my environmental studies degree in that house
I'm not familiar with Mexico, but I'm guessing Very Basic Water Infrastructure would help in some places.
Trees attract rain. If tree urinals would help the arid northern part of Mexico near the US border, it might draw more rain to the area. I used to camp by a river and the answer was "Don't wait for the rain to stop in the morning. Pack up and walk away from the tree-lined river. You will be walking out of the rain nine times out of ten "
Transpiration is a factor and I'm not sure what else. But tree urinals should help mitigate local issues by moderating temperature extremes and attracting a bit more rain.
That's a big difference. You can potentially double or nearly double the rainfall by adding trees. And in very underdeveloped areas, you can initially water them with urine and improve infrastructure that way and hygiene and potentially food security if you plant fruit and nut trees.
Tree urinals may be a place to start improving things for Mexican villages to stem the tide of illegal immigrants dying in the desert.
You may be able to use three of the four Development Recipes I've written elsewhere. The first one links out to stuff like very basic water infrastructure and stuff on r/housingworks.
You could translate all of it into Spanish AND any Indigenous languages or other languages that are pertinent to the targeted areas. See: Languages of South America
Get demographics on the illegal migrants and target where they are coming from. They don't all come from the dry border areas. Some come from other South American countries.
The primary goal should be technical assistance, not money per se. Add information and expertise and just enough money or material resources to get things going in very distressed areas.
This is not intended to be "charity" where rich people give money to poor people because, awwwww, poor baby. It's intended to help stabilize their economy because the global economy has become destabilized and it's fostering issues like this.
Metrics for success:
1. Reduce illegal immigration
2. Reduce migrant deaths
3. Avert a potential war with our nextdoor neighbor.
They may also need some help developing sustainable sources of income. But tree urinals using fruit and nut trees will help feed them without ANY money per se. So my focus is not on money per se because money per se is a poor metric overall.
Poverty is expensive. That's the entire problem with poverty: you need more money than you can come up with because something is fundamentally broken.