Mexico's junk history of the American Southwest

Dale Wilcox:

This month marks the 171st anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo; the 1848 agreement that ended the Mexican-American War and secured for the U.S. most of the lands of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, as well as small parts of Colorado and Kansas.

That it came just before President Trump refused in his State of the Union address to commit to an amnesty-for-wall deal was actually coincidental. Although the land granted under the Treaty was exchanged for money and debt-relief (and ratified by large majorities of both the Mexican and Democrat-led U.S. senates), today the transfer is routinely characterized as an act of theft. Because of this, so the argument goes, both a border wall along those lands and a denial of amnesty are respectively illegitimate and unjust.

The stolen-land or “reconquest” argument for amnesty stands out among the others because, as Samuel Huntington once pointed out, it is fundamentally an aggressive one. It suggests that amnesty is a form of justice and that it is Mexicans’ right to freely enter these parts of the U.S. since it was once their land. As the slogan goes: “We didn’t cross the borders, the border crossed us.” It stands for immigration as vindication.
...

Of course, it’s true that the indigenous people of the Southwest inhabited the region before the president’s ancestors (who arrived in the late 1800s) as well as the early English settlers. In the mid-1500s, they were colonized by Spanish conquistadores and then, in 1810, forcibly made to merge into newly independent Mexico. That they were subsumed into a Spanish-turned-mestizo population along the way isn’t mentioned by Krauze and rarely is elsewhere because it creates a problem.

Although there certainly were earlier arrivals in the Southwest than the English, the Spanish were imperialists who enslaved indigenous males and turned the women into concubines. The entire premise of the reconquest argument is that the U.S. aggressively took the Southwest and is, therefore, holding it illegitimately. In forgetting this, the argument simply becomes one of who stole the land from the indigenous first. As NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck has put it, Mexicans who make this argument “have no more claim on free migration to the U.S. than do citizens of Great Britain who can point out that their country once owned what is now the eastern U.S. but lost it in a violent takeover by the Americans.”

Further, the population of the region in 1848 was miniscule, at around 80,000 or just one percent of Mexico’s population at the time. And when the U.S. offered citizenship to the mestizo inhabitants, most took it. Because the population was small and most stayed put, Mexicans south of the border today have little to no ancestral claim to them or the land. In other words, there’s nothing to “take back.”
...

They include Texas is this argument even though it was already an independent republic before it became part of the US.  While colonists from the US were certainly behind the Texas Revolution, indigenous Hispanics also joined in the rebellion against the dictator Santa Anna.  They are also considered heroes of the Texas Revolution and some have towns and other things named after them.  If they read the Texas Declaration of Independence, they would know that it sets out the reasons for the rebellion which are quite different from what proponents of the "reconquest" argument claim.

What is really behind this migration is the failure of Mexican and Central American governments to provide economic freedom and to protect the people.  Those countries lack opportunities that are available in a free market system.  Ironically, when they get here they tend to vote for those in this country who attack the free market.