It’s written all over the visa lines, stretching from Mexicali to Caracas, from Havana to San Salvador, from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil, from La Paz to La Paz – and like the Drug War, its most violent edge is at the 1400-mile-long U.S. Mexican border, from Matamoros and Brownsville to Tijuana and San Diego where thousands of immigrants from all over the hemisphere and elsewhere walk through scorched no-man’s-land deserts and dangerous smuggler routes full of human barbarians – all for the chance to come here illegally as something better than living in their hellish homelands.

There’s an immigration crisis in the U.S., prompting our more Neanderthal congressmen to propose building a wall to keep illegal immigrants out. Latin America’s good presidents, people like Vicente Fox and Tony Saca and Oscar Berger, much to my grief, have taken offense at this. But the Le-Pen-like reaction of our U.S. Congressional Neanderthals is a response to a problem that is real: the fact that too many people from Latin America just don’t want to live there. For years, many Latin American nations have used the safety valve of immigration as the solution to their own failures to create viable states that people want to live in, states that can create wealth, jobs and a significant middle class.

Meanwhile, Latin America’s Leftward Swing of elections, bringing on a new host of leaders with absolutely-guaranteed-to-fail socialist economic policies is bound to drive more Latin Americans north. And thus, the Wall, symbol of the U.S.’s inability to sell its ideas, sadly awaits as the solution.

Josue Sierra at Latino Issues has one of the most powerful posts I’ve ever read describing this issue, that of the failure of Latin America’s states and the cynical resulting solution, ultimately sad for both sides. He’s analyzed it with searing clarity unlike anything else I’ve read. It’s a must-read here.