fred sets you straight on the reality of life in mexico;

By Fred Reed for the Saker Blog

American notions of Mexico are often decades out of date or just wrong. Nativists suffering from what appears to be minor mental unbalance sometimes refer to it as a Third World hellhole, which is silly. The country has problems, corruption, organized crime, uneven distribution of wealth. The bureaucracy can be maddening. The cartels engage in intramural massacres. Things are uneven: In remote areas roads have sometimes crumbled to the point that cars need to proceed at two miles an hour, while elsewhere first-rate modern highways punch through horrific mountainous terrain. Yet all in all, Mexico is reasonably prosperous, modern and, in most things competent. It is not Japan or South Korea, not a technological leader and never will be, but hellhole it ain’t.

Among outdated ideas is that the Mexican population is exploding. It is not. The CIA World Factbook puts total births per woman in Mexico at 2.17, .07 above replacement, and mother’s mean age at first birth, as 21.3. In the Fifties, the birth rate was astronomical. Now, no. Why the change?

An anecdotal explanation for the drop in fertility: When I came to Mexico twenty years ago, I met Lupita, a pretty and very Indian woman, from a family of eleven (!) siblings. She had two children. The son is now a lawyer, the daughter a doctor. Why only two children, I asked. She said she could have two, raise them well, and live in a nice house, or have a dozen and live in a shack, and said that if I tried having a baby, I wouldn’t want ten more. I might add that Lupita and her American husband founded a successful elder-care service, with Lupita handling the facility and routine nursing with hubby managing patient relations.

A broader explanation for the drop in fertility and a great many other things in Mexico is that the country is becoming middle class, loosely defined as having a house, job, husband or wife, refrigerator, and children in school. The middle class all around the world has low crime, small families, and values education.

Health in Mexico is generally good. The Fact Book puts life expectancy at birth in Mexico at 76.9 years. America: 77 years. These figures do not suggest a disease-ridden hellhole.

Another belief common in America is that Mexicans would all move to the US if they could. No. In the past the reason for emigrating northward was money, nothing else. American culture is seldom attractive to Mexicans. As the economy has improved, emigration has dropped, with impoverished Central Americans now going north.

Mexico is not a technological backwater. Landline telephones, cellphones, and WIFI work. Mexican airlines have good safety records, train their pilots, maintain high-bypass turbofans and avionics. In Guadalajara, a medical center, I have twice had eye surgery with good results, an MRI, for $150, and various instrument-heavy procedures. The poor, rural, and uninsured have less access to medical care, but this is also true in America, where many do not go to doctors because of cost.......read more......