EDITORIAL: Something there is that likes a wall

OPINION:

Something was lost in the coverage when President Enrique Pena Nieto entertained Donald Trump in Mexico last month. Most of the reporters expected the two men to greet each other with baseball bats and brass knuckles and instead they established a mutual civility that is, alas, missing between Hillary and the Donald. Not paying attention to what the two presidents were saying to each other, most of the reporters missed the most important thing to come out of the meeting. “Making Mexico’s borders with our friends and neighbors in Central America more secure,” said President Nieto, “is of vital importance for Mexico and the United States.”

He couldn’t show more than ritual anger at the Donald’s vow to build a wall on the border, or even at the suggestion that Mexico would pay for it — a threat more rhetoric than reality — because Mexico would like to have such a wall on its southern border, too, and Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua together couldn’t come up with the scratch to pay for it, even if they wanted to. The embarrassing truth is that Mexico is considerably less forgiving of illegal border crossing than the United States. Mr. Nieto wants no robust public discussion of that, either. Crossing into Mexico illegally from anywhere is a felony. “Undocumented” immigrants in Mexico are treated as what they are, criminals to be imprisoned or deported at once. In fact, Mexico deported more illegal entrants crossing its southern border last year than the United States deported for illegal entry across the border into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Not only that, a foreigner overstaying a visa, or successfully slipping in to take a job from a Mexican invites tough treatment. Mexico’s immigration policy is meant to protect Mexicans. Only healthy men and women with needed skills and the ability to sustain themselves and strengthen Mexico will be admitted. Everyone else is told to go home or expect to go to jail. Mexico’s immigration laws, furthermore, bar immigration that could “upset the equilibrium of the national demographics.” (Racism, anyone?)

Mr. Nieto’s emphasis on threats to the “equilibrium of the national demographics” in his meeting with Mr. Trump was not only a recognition of a shared problem, but to remind Americans that many of those crossing into the United States from Mexico are not Mexicans, as in the past, but illegals from Central America who are just passing through Mexico to get here. President Nieto knows that securing his southern border would strengthen ours.

In a study in 2015, the Pew Research Center concluded that Mexico is “a land bridge for Central American immigrants” headed to the United States, as dramatically used by unaccompanied Central American young people over the last few years. Many Mexicans, to be sure, are slipping across the Rio Grande to get to a new and better life in the United States, too, but their numbers are declining and about to be eclipsed by seekers from Central America who risk the perils of two border crossings to make it. Mr. Nieto and Mr. Trump can feel each other’s pain, and maybe they could search together for a builder who knows how to build walls.