I don’t know why you would think liberals favor illegal immigration as a way of increasing government liability. That’s just silly. Not to mention your vote argument doesn’t exactly hold water because last I checked, illegal immigrants can’t legally vote. In fact, legal immigrants cannot legally vote either. So I don’t exactly understand your argument.
My view is that liberals are not for illegal immigration, but they are for humane treatment of illegal immigrants once they are in this country. In addition to the humanitarian argument that people within these borders should not be made to suffer simply because they are looking to work, which last I checked is considered a fairly noble cause, the practical matter is that having an unknown population within our borders which has no ability to work and no access to any basic services is how you develop some nasty social pathologies like gang violence, crime, disease, and other things that are not in our best interest to let fester. So the practical solution, given that wholesale hunting down and repatriation (especially given the business interests that rely upon them) is simply not practical, is to work out some sort of humane and economic solution, rather than rhetoric.
As for Mexico, if you want to understand the situation there, or the rest of Central and South America, it’s not all that complicated. Take a look at the Google Earth mapping software, and zoom in on Rio de Janeiro, or Sao Paulo, and see if you can identify the favelas (slums), and the wealthy areas. In Sao Paulo just look at the sheer density and sprawl of the world’s second largest city. We can spew rhetoric here about democratization in South America yadda yadda yadda, but the fact of the matter is our interest here is primarily in creating trade partners and markets for our goods. But the problem is that most of these countries are still suffering from a post-colonial hangover, which has resulted in some of the most lopsided wealth distributions in the world. So you have in Rio, for instance, 30% of the population which lives in incredibly violent shantytowns, and then a small percentage who own most of the wealth, which lives in armed compounds. Sao Paulo has the largest number of private helipads in the world, many of which are used for commuting to work. I think that democracy is a fine idea for these countries, but the fact is that there are a lot of entrenched interests that don’t give a shit about fairness or democracy, and only want to perpetuate the system because it works for them.
Mexico isn’t a lot different. You have an upper class population of mestizo or European descent and then a bunch of poor Indians with little social or economic mobility. Is it any wonder there is such upheaval in Central and South America all the time? I went to grad school in LA, and all my classmates from Mexico and South America were pretty much the whitest people you’d find, which sort of contrasted my impressions of those places as being the home of brown-skinned people. It was an interesting introduction to latin social politics. Even a filipino in my class could trace his descent back to Spain, which I think only 1% of the Phillippines can do.
Anyway, my point is that those places are scary, and as a country I think we pay a lot more lip service to helping them than we actually care about. There’s obviously a limit to what we can do, but I think we don’t play with a full deck in our dealings there because there is simply a very powerful upper class that may see the pie as zero-sum and not have any particular interest in creating a more egalitarian society. And we don’t try and penetrate this problem because we don’t really care that much. And hence the poor, if they have the means and courage, try to venture someplace where they might be opportunity; i.e., the US.
