By Sushil Kutty
Mexico or ‘Mehico’? Mexicans have never stopped calling Mexico ‘Mehico’, just like Mumbaikars never stopped Bombay ‘Mumbai’ in their heads throughout the British Raj. And ‘Mehicans’ have always considered California Mexico’s land, taken by force sometime in the past when the American wild west ran afoul of the Spaniards who had occupied the region called Mexico and lands south of Mexico.
The sentiment continues to run deep among Mexicans and in huge numbers of non-Mexicans, too. That California is not a state of the United States of America. And is in line with a worldwide trend. Countries worldwide covet land beyond their stated borders. Think of China and Tibet. China’s expansionist mind is always in overplay. Nowadays it is Arunachal Pradesh for all the good it’s doing to Indo-China relations. ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai’ died with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
China’s footprints run deep into Modi’s psyche. And Indians, a billion plus, have always had China plaguining their minds. Just like Donald Trump’s MAGA people have Mexico in theirs ever since 90,00,000 undocumented immigrants, the majority of them Latinos, took to the streets in Los Angeles and began undermining Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration drive led by the ICE!
ICE is the hottest thing that has happened to Mexicans who live off America’s largesse like Bangladeshi and Rohingya “ghuspetiyas” live off India’s largesse, albeit with legal documents procured illegally. And now, while the Modi government and the Rekha Gupta government, not to be left behind Yogi Adityanath government, go hammer and tong against ‘jhuggi dwellers’, most of them suspected ‘Bangladeshi and Rohingya’ illegal immigrants, the Trump administration is fighting a “war” with illegal immigrants in California and the mainstream media is not with the Trump administration.
The United States’ federal immigration laws are not worth a cent on the streets and in the alleys and bylanes of Los Angeles, America’s second biggest city. The world’s media have spread out in the United States and Trump’s tough talk has only fueled rather than doused the fires in the streets and in the hearts of people who fear Trump’s policies and consider him a devil in disguise.
The same Trump who had, on taking charge of the United States on January 20, 2025, vowed to bring Mexico to heel along with the appropriation of Canada as the “51st state of the United States”, and Greenland for dessert.
Those dreams of an emerging expansionist, a la China’s Xi Jinping, have now been laid to rest by whatever’s happening to the Trump administration’s anti-immigration actions let loose in California and elsewhere. “People” are fighting back even as “days worth of photos and footage from the riots” show rioters burning cars, assaulting police, and throwing bricks at vehicles.
All this while waving the “defining symbol of the LA protests”, the Mexican flag! The protestors are using the Mexican flag to “express solidarity with immigrants and denounce the Trump administration’s raids…”, said one prominent media outlet, one which has never stopped dogging Trump’s heels, which started with his first term in office.
“The flags speak to the generations of people from Mexico and other Latin American countries who have called the US, and particularly California, home,” a professor of the University of California ‘Xed’. “The flags mean their families. The flags mean their communities. It is not about having an international invasion.”
Is that so? What else could be less international than the Mexican President posting to ‘X’ on behalf of the protestors, who United States Vice President JD Vance has called “insurrectionists”, stating that Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”, which includes a remittance tax on immigrant money transfers, should be implemented without more waste of time.
“Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil,” Vance wrote on ‘X’. “Time to pass President Trump’s beautiful bill and further secure the border.”
The Trump administration has taken note of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum recently sending a shout out to Mexican migrants in the United States to protest the proposed remittance tax.
“If necessary, we’ll mobilize,” she said in the video. “We don’t want taxes on remittances from our fellow countrymen in the United States to Mexico.”
This is “war talk” and the American hardliners against illegal aliens have taken note, with one Republican senator introducing an amendment to President Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’: “Quadruple the remittance tax. Take it from 3.5 percent to 15 percent”, he wrote on ‘X’, kick-starting a debate over the Mexican President’s “interference in US affairs” even as violence tips talk in and out of favour of the undocumented illegal aliens! (IPA Service)
