Since I don't really drink and I've always been suspicious of any activity that might accidentally result in a richer life experience, I spent most of my teens and early twenties indoors, putting in quality time at important work like optimizing traffic flow in and out of the downtown core of my latest SimCity 4 savegame file. Sure, I knew this was reducing the risk of me ever getting laid, even by some kind of casual accident, by as much as 100%*, but the effort paid me back with the long-term lesson of... um... well, there was a much flatter learning curve when I bought Cities: Skylines last year.
I work at a place now that includes travel (for other positions, not mine) and some sort of potential-lawsuit-mitigation mandatory training about international travel that every year basically boils down to: if you go to Mexico, you will certainly die. Not immediately, only after you are first kidnapped, but after that, yes, you should count on being murdered in a grisly way, one body part at a time as it is sent back to your family. It all sounds so unhygienic, it has successfully put me off ever going. I just imagine Mexican postmen walking around with their collected outgoing mail, their canvas bags heavy with drippy envelopes full of fingers and ears en route to the States to show proof of life. They have to put those bags down from time to time, like on benches or sidewalks or whatever. Super gross. It's like the same reason I won't ever go to Gibraltar until they get their feral monkey infestation sorted out. Unclean is a dealbreaker.
I'm not sure if the message about the flood or severed body parts has gotten out and affected overall tourism numbers between the U.S. and Mexico or not, but coming the other direction--I don't know if you've heard this or not--there seems to be little or no compunction in certain sectors of Mexican society about relocating up here. The only thing I can think of is that they don't know how up here we have Chipotle with those vats of olive-drab guacamole slowly browning in a sloppy tub of questionable temperature. Yeah, OK, it's not thumbs in an envelope, but revulsion is revulsion. It's not a question of degrees. Put that on a billboard in San Ysidro facing south and see how many people still bother trying to come. It drives me to want to move to a Chipotle-free state on a regular basis, except I'm no longer sure such a place exists anymore.
Apparently though coming here from Mexico is still fairly popular. So popular in fact, over the last 30 years or so, it's even inspired pretty racist public displays of outsider art masquerading as actual official government traffic signs in some areas along the extreme southern end of Interstate 5:
Nobody seems on board with my guacamole deterrent idea, so the going idea for keeping people from traveling north from Mexico into this country is a giant regular wall, seven hundred feet tall, three hundred miles long and constructed of ice and stone and held together by magic. It's possible I'm conflating more than one unrelated idea there, but essentially the point holds as it seems just as likely that we'll get a zombie-proof magic ice wall before we get an actual conventional border wall. So far we've been exactly as successful at securing funds for either or both options, so the difference seems purely rhetorical at this point.
The latest idea is to shut down the government until the government agrees to pay for the Mexico border wall. Just to clarify, that would be the American government we'd be shutting down in order to coerce the American government to pay for the border wall. It seems actually unlikely to happen since literally nobody seems willing or even vaguely interested in pressing that kind of political action. But remember, this is the Trump Era. The business model is: build it first, then don't actually pay for any of the work done. That's how you make a billion dollars in shitty real estate deals. And he must be good at it because if he weren't, he wouldn't currently be between bankruptcies for the moment, just in time to accidentally become president of all of America at the same time.
If a wall goes up, nobody can Fake News it away. Write down the balance due, send the bill to
Mexico President
The White House of Mexico
Mexico, D.C.
and then sit back, remind everyone how you can't trust foreigners to responsibly pay their bills and reap the automatic benefits of deeply reliable American xenophobia. The good news is we'll be able to test empirically whether the plan is literally fool-proof or not.
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*It's hard to remember, but there was a time when computer gaming was decidedly not a mainstream cultural pastime. It was a thing you did while you patiently waited for someone to invent Paxil.
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