Causes and Solutions

Why can't anyone offer meaningful conversation on how to solve this problem--improving the lot of the poor so they don't have a need to migrate?

Pointing fingers and deriding other people will not solve anything but will make it worse.

To be sure many of or Southern neighbors have reason to seek a better life for themselves and their families but openings wide open borders and pointing fingers at incompetent politicians just widens the gap.

If you can't even identify the problem and its causes it is extremely unikely you will be able to fix it.

Legalizing all stupidly banned popular substances would be a start by removing a major source of funding from the multi-billion dollar black market currently dominated by violent organized criminals and apparently at least a few of the alphabet soup clandestine federal agencies in the US government.

Ending the meddling by the US government in internal affairs of other nations that has led to social strife and suffering EACH AND EVERY TIME. The time of US hegemony ended decades ago. The USA would never stand for being treated the way it treats other nations.

It seems each time these nations elect the government they want that negatively affects certain US economic interests, the USA works to overthrow the government or otherwise destabilize it, often committing atrocities and crimes against humanity in the process with no negative repercussions at all beyond the flight of refugees to the US border, to which certain slimebag politicians respond by making a wedge issue out of the refugees and migrant workers with no care or compassion whatsoever for their well being.

Instead of doing business with China how about investing in the nations who are our neighbors instead of simply exploiting their circumstances and their resources? While I have nothing against China's politico-economic form of government, I believe it is inherently unfair competition to do business with nations that use what is essentially slave labor and whose value of their currency is not based on international market value. They fall into a special category and doing business with them requires different rules that currently are not being applied.

Guatemala and Honduras both currently have conservative governments seeking, like the USA, to take advantage of the situation for political gain, blaming "leftist" elements for fomenting instability, instead of dealing with the actual facts on the ground, same as the US government. So it's damn near impossible to implement any meaningful solutions until the actors involved act like mature and responsible adults. Mexico played along with the USA to appease them and NOT allow the USA to make this about Mexico, a shrewd move by an outgoing government with really nothing to lose, while the incoming government has refrained from criticizing the current government and has instead offered renewed assistance and vowed to protect a people's right to migrate to seek a better life, setting the example and making the case for better treatment of Mexicans and other migrants by the USA.

Perhaps if the USA had not meddled in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador these migrations and the continuous flow of mostly refugees from those nations would not be occurring. And if all our nations ceased playing the Prohibition game with popular substances used by more than 40 million US citizens, another policy originating in US racism, there wouldn't be anything remotely resembling the levels of violence causing folks to flee their communities in the first place.

One glaring question remains, how long does a US policy have to be an abject failure causing an untold amount of death and suffering before they fix it? 50 years? 75 years? How long? Therein apparently lies the so far unresolvable conundrum.