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Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?

By Tom Bethell on 6.20.06 @ 12:05AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Because they can't find jobs, we are always told. And inquisitiveness stops right there. No jobs in Mexico. But why are there not?

Why does the U.S. create millions of jobs every year and Mexico create refugees? In all the hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles I have read about immigration, I have not once seen this question addressed. What exactly is wrong in Mexico? Clearly Mexicans are effective workers, otherwise they wouldn't be in demand as day laborers here. Mexicans come with brains and muscles like everyone else.

Journalists have shown no interest in this question. Years ago, I wrote a few articles about the Mexican economy but short of spending time in that country it is not easy to discover the truth. A great deal of agricultural labor clearly became uneconomic and millions of peasants moved to Mexico City where they set up shanties and encampments. If the president of that country, Vicente Fox, knows what's wrong, he seems incapable of doing anything about it.

Hernando de Soto's organization was invited to Mexico and did some work on the question. He says that only 6 percent of Mexican enterprises are legal, the rest are informal. If you want yours legalized, it will take you four years with no certainty in the outcome.

I don't think World Bank officials understand these matters and may not be interested. With their huge tax-free salaries, their lives are already comfortable enough and they are not about to leave their desks and go delving into the complexities of property registration or the customary law of those dreadful shanty towns. For the officers of the development banks and the aid agencies, "the economy" of the countries they oversee is confined to what happens in the centrally located skyscrapers. Activity in the slums that surround them is as remote from their concerns as it is from the legal system itself. It is outside the law and outside their purview.

Journalists will not take an interest unless the president of the United States leads the way. Clearly there is ideological bias here. Journalists are not of their own accord going to start talking about the indispensability of formalized and registered property. De Soto himself said that when he is invited into some Third World country, tact is essential. He can't just advocate property rights. They were successfully demonized for so long that he has to be diplomatic if he is to keep the politicians on his side.

IT'S GOOD, THEREFORE, that Grover Norquist has taken an interest in the subject and has organized an affiliate group, the Property Rights Alliance. A fellowship will be named after Hernando de Soto.

Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, promptly canonized as Africa's "first female elected leader," happened to be in town at the same time as de Soto. When she stopped by the Washington Post, she was asked (according to the editorial page editor) "how she will plead her case for aid to Bush." Not whether but how, notice, and I think that for the Washington establishment, that is the only imaginable way to get an African economy off the ground. In Washington, wealth is thought of as something transferred, not created.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Economics, Business, Books, Law, Africa, Immigration