Mexico

My first-ever visit to Mexico gave me some perspective on America's crucial neighbor.

Ilya Somin | 12.13.2025 4:46 PM

During the first week of December, I spent several days doing speaking engagements in Mexico. Although I have previously visited several Latin American nations, and even twice served as a visiting professor in Argentina, this was my first-ever visit to our southern neighbor. I spoke on a panel on "Migration in the 21st Century" at the FIL Guadalajara International Book Fair (one of the largest book fairs in the Spanish-speaking world), and gave two talks on democracy and political ignorance at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Tec de Monterrey), one of the country's leading universities. The experience gave me some interesting new perspective on our vitally important neighbor to the south.

Before continuing, I should emphasize I am not an expert on Mexico, and I speak little Spanish (though my wife, who came with me on the trip, is fluent in the language).  In addition, I obviously did not encounter anything like a statistically representative sample of Mexicans. This post, therefore, can provide only very modest insight. But that modest insight might still have some value.

At least when it comes to Guadalajara and Monterrey, Mexico seems a much more affluent nation than many Americans might assume. My family and I saw little, if any of the grinding poverty that is commonplace in many poor countries I have been to, such as China, Russia, El Salvador, and Uruguay. For example, we saw almost no homeless people or beggars.

Guadalajara and Monterrey are two of Mexico's wealthiest cities; thus not representative. But, in many poor countries, poverty is evident in relatively affluent areas. Mexico's economic progress is also evident from per capita GDP statistics, which show rapid gains in recent years. The country is no longer the cesspool of poverty some in the US imagine it to be.

This progress was, also, in some ways, in evidence at the FIL Guadaljara book fair, when I spoke there. Not surprisingly, the other........

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