we do not have a country anymore

There is no southern border anymore, and we can thank Brandon for that.

To me, the fundamental question is: what drives all this illegal immigration? And the answer seems obvious: the problem lies mostly with Mexico and the other Latin states from which these people are coming. So the next logical question is: what can we do to incentivize these illegals to stop thronging to the US? The answer to that is probably complex and expensive, but at bottom, it comes down to helping these Latin countries—Mexico most of all—make life livable for their own citizens. Why would someone from Mexico (etc.) want to leave in the first place? What are these countries not providing their people? What pressures exist in these countries (gang violence, drug cartels, repressive governments, etc.) that cause people to yearn for security and the opportunity to make a proper living? (And isn't it ironic that, for these people to cross the US border, they have to rely on those very same cartels to boost them over the fence?) Side question: what is the US doing to incentivize immigration (because we're not blameless, either)? What, then, does the US need to stop doing to tempt people to jump the fence? We definitely need to rethink our own immigration policy.

Personally, I would like to see a strong, happy, beautiful Mexico that is free of cartels. In my more totalitarian moments, I think we should, with permission from the Mexican government, send our military southward to burn out every last vestige of drug-related criminality. But the problem immediately complicates itself: the reason there's such a huge supply of drugs is that there's such a huge demand for drugs inside our own borders—from poor, inner-city black folks to rich, overprivileged white college students and beyond. I don't know what the practical solutions to this problem are, but as I sketchily outlined above, we already have the grounding principles for a foreign policy. I'm all for the border wall, but in the end, the border wall is just a stopgap that doesn't go to the root of the problem. We need the political courage to try something big. And part of that solution is going to have to involve calling on the people of these Latin nations to throw off the yoke of socialism and embrace capitalism all while eliminating their deeply rooted corruption. Is that even possible? And do we have a right to ask others to get rid of their corruption when we have so much of our own?