Jorge Ramos was born in Mexico City and became a journalist there. He eventually came to America on a student visa, got a job at a Spanish-language TV station in Los Angeles, liked it, and stayed. Along the way, he became rich and famous as the face of the news on Univision, America's largest provider of Spanish-language content. Although registered as an independent, his political stances, especially his support for open-borders, align him completely with the current hard-left incarnation of the Democrat party.

On Friday, a very unhappy Ramos acknowledged that Trump fulfilled one of his campaign promises. When Trump said that he was going to build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it, Leftists simultaneously castigated him for racism and laughed at the notion that Mexico would ever pay to keep its citizens from fleeing corruption and poverty within Mexico by illegally crossing into the United States.

After all, for Mexico, illegal immigration into America is a great gig, because it acts as a safety valve and a source of funds. If they didn't have unlimited access to America (that is, unlimited by such constraints as visas and immigration policies), Mexican citizens who have been burdened by decades of corruption and mismanagement would have no option but to suffer and then, finally, to rise up in revolution. For decades now, from the government's point of view, it's been better to give unhappy citizens a pamphlet with advice about crossing the border safely (albeit illegally) and then sit back and wait for the remittances ($26.1 billion in 2017) that help keep the Mexican government afloat.

Imagine the shock for the open-border left when Trump didn't just keep his promise, but went one better, by getting Mexican president Andrés Manuel López-Obrador (aka AMLO) to act as his armed enforcer at Mexico's southern border, blocking caravans making their way to America from mismanaged countries south of Mexico.

Well, you don't actually need to imagine the shock, because Ramos spells it out for you in a New York Times opinion piece:

Mexico has effectively turned into an extension of Mr. Trump's immigration police beyond American territory. And this is the case on multiple fronts: On the southern border with Guatemala, they prevent Central American migrants from coming into Mexico; on the northern one, they block those seeking entry to the United States from leaving. The decision of Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, to follow this approach is misguided. He should let migrants continue their journey north. [snip] This is a radical change in immigration policy for the United States. In the past, Central American asylum seekers were allowed to remain on American soil while waiting for their cases to be processed. Central American immigration has always been a source of frustration for the United States. But the most powerful country in the world holds a certain degree of responsibility for what goes on in its hemisphere, and it is perfectly capable of accepting the most vulnerable people on the continent. It has done it before, and can still do it.

That's some serious arrogance there. This man, whom America graciously allowed in, now insists that America simply open her borders and welcome tens of millions of illiterate, unskilled people because he claims she has an entirely imaginary responsibility to make life better for them.

The fact that unlimited illegal immigration often makes life less good for those in America legally, whether African-Americans who lose jobs and housing to these illegal aliens or taxpayers who find themselves funding people who have no right to be here, is irrelevant to Ramos. He's like the houseguest who insists that he's entitled to invite his whole family and their neighbors over and, by the way, would you please give all of them your ATM card?

Ramos is correct that Latin America is bedeviled by "extreme poverty and gang violence." Large parts of Latin America are in terrible shape — but that doesn't give the population license to bring those problems to America. This is not a war or a genocide, and they are not refugees. Their desire to come to America is rational, but that doesn't mean it's rational for Americans that they come.

Moreover, as noted at the top of this article in connection with Mexico, Ramos's approach does nothing more than give corrupt, ineffective Latin American governments a way to relieve population pressure and bring in money. In other words, Ramos wants to prop up the same dysfunction he claims to despise.

If Ramos wants to help beleaguered Latin Americans, he needs to go to those countries and use his fame and intelligence to change the government and culture on the ground there. That's hard work, though. It's easier to write opinion pieces for the New York Times.