Will on Phoenix's Mexico Problem

Don't look now, but George Will had a couple of mostly sensible columns on Mexican drug violence spilling over into Arizona this week. One part, however, that jumped out at me as not being particularly sensible was the finale to his first column: 

There are more than 6,600 licensed American gun dealers on the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. They should obey the law, even though most of the victims of the cartels' violence deserve to be.

I'm not quite comfortable with calling the victims of Mexico's drug wars innocent, but nor do I think it fair to say that the majority of the people 5,600 or so Mexicans murdered last year deserved their fate. But really, a judgment on their end is beside the point (and above our pay grade); the fact is that the 100 million Mexicans who have nothing to do with the narcotics trade don't want to live in a nation where close to 6,000 are gunned down by criminal gangs each year, nor do the 300 million likewise uninvolved Americans want their southern neighbor to be such an unstable and violent place. 

I also disagree with his assertion that it is far-fetched to think that drug gangs can survive "a determined drive by the Mexican military, assisted by U.S. military technologies." I guess it depends what your threshold is for "determined", but Mexican drug gangs are certain to live on beyond Calderón's term, just as the Colombian suppliers have survived despite all the work of the Uribe government (which I would think would meet anyone's definition of a determined push assisted by American military technology). The Mexican government can hopefully make the gangs smaller, weaker, and more defensive organizations, but it cannot wipe them off the map any more than it can wish away American drug demand. To think otherwise strikes me as irrationally optimistic, as well as profoundly unconservative. 

But the columns were redeemed from those problems by this paragraph, along with a few others: 

We know how to close a border, says [Phoenix Police Chief Jack] Harris with acid dryness -- "build a wall" and deploy "machine gun nests." But, "I personally think that is stupid." For now, however, the United States "has turned immigration policy over to Mexican thugs." So we have reached a point at which barbed wire, car batteries and acid become the business tools of kidnapper-torturer-extortionists.

With a force large enough to police the nation's fifth-largest city, Harris can deploy 60 officers to deal with one kidnapping. That would be impossible in smaller cities, to which such crime might be driven by success here. But "don't give me 50 more" officers to "deal with the symptoms." Rather, says Harris, who was raised in a rough Phoenix neighborhood, give me comprehensive immigration reform that controls the borders, provides for whatever seasonal immigration the nation wants, and one way or another settles the status of the 12 million who are here illegally -- 55 percent of whom have been here at least eight years.

Every time the Post or the New York Times publishes an editorial about Mexico, it is much commented upon here. It strikes me as odd, then, that such an influential writer could devote 1,500 words to Mexico in the same space, and yet I've heard nothing about it in the Mexican media. George Will (or Tom Friedman or Paul Krugman or E.J. Dionne) is more likely to change someone's mind than the Post or Times editorial page, don't you think?