Quotes & Sayings About Us Mexico Border

I was stationed in Turkey, Mexico City, South America, Texas, Arizona, so I do know where the Mexican-U.S. border is. — Joe Arpaio

Some months before I declared, I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico. I did not go with a plan. I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas - how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence. — Ronald Reagan

The basic fact of the drug war was that the cartels were fighting one another for the right to export narcotics to the United States. An estimated 90 percent of all the drugs used in America flowed through Mexico, and roughly 90 percent of the weapons used by the cartels came from the United States. (The ban on assault weapons that Bill signed in 1994 expired ten years later and was not renewed, opening the door to increased arms trafficking across the border.) It was hard to look at these facts and not conclude that America shared responsibility for helping Mexico stop the violence. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The drug problem is in the United States, not in Mexico. It's a demand problem and that is to be dealt with here, and it is not being dealt with. It's been shown over and over that prevention and treatment are far more cost effective than police action, out-of-country action, border control, and so on. — Noam Chomsky

Carter also was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped. — Donella H. Meadows

A man named Vicente Fox was sworn in as president of Mexico, ending seventy-five years of control by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Across the border, the United States Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Bush v. Gore, deciding the 2000 presidential election and ensuring the term "hanging chad" took its place permanently in the English lexicon. Leninist guerrillas launched an attack in Istanbul, and a series of bombs exploded in downtown Manila, killing twenty-two people and injuring dozens more. Cambodia's failed coup slipped from network news bulletins, and the country returned once more to relative international obscurity. — Dan Eaton

The Pentagon tested an anti-missile system in New Mexico Wednesday. The test was an incomplete success. While the interceptor was shooting down the incoming missile, three thousand illegal aliens walked right across the border under its nose. — Argus Hamilton

By encouraging its citizens to violate our border, Mexico is pushing a tremendous welfare burden off of its shoulders and onto ours, while also benefiting from the significant sums of U.S. currency that these workers will eventually send back home to their families. — Spencer Bachus

My total focus was on building up our military, building up our strength, building up our borders, making sure that China, Japan, Mexico, both at the border and in trade, no longer takes advantage of our country. — Donald Trump

The worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government. The Border Patrol knows this. Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. — Donald Trump

If you look at China - and frankly, Vietnam now is doing a big number, and you look at Japan and India and Mexico - Mexico's killing us at the border and they're killing us with trade. — Donald Trump

When we talk about corruption, there's corruption on both sides of the border. That's what I think is interesting. I'm from Mexico, so when I see a Mexican portrayed in the American market on TV or films, you better do it right because you won't fool me. I'm sure no one really cares on this side of the border, if they get it right or not, but all the way from Mexico, to another 120 countries where the show goes, they will be able to tell the difference. — Demian Bichir

Fifty thousand people in Mexico have been murdered. Puerto Penasco, 60 miles south of our border, just had five people and a police officer killed. That is like part of Arizona, and it is spilling over into our state. — Jan Brewer

In other words, to whatever extent migrants are crossing the border and thereby (ostensibly) taking other people's jobs, it is only because the economy of Mexico has been considerably undermined by the policies of our country. — Tim Wise

There's tremendous crime and illegal immigration is just incredible. As far as Rubio, he's very weak on immigration, you know, I have great relations with Mexico and I love the Mexican people, and the spirit of the Mexican people. These are people just pouring across the border. — Donald Trump

I was told by journalists who can't publish it that there are in Mexico, close to the U.S. border, big areas that used to be devoted to agriculture that are now devoted to poppies. They say you can't get in there because they're guarded, first by the cartels, but also by the army, which goes hand in hand with the cartels. — Noam Chomsky

Mexico is an important trading partner, it's the number one trading partner for the state of Texas. We have had dealings with them, shared a border with them. We have had our challenges, but at the end of the day we want a good relationship with Mexico. — Rick Perry

Some people put us down. But I still haven't heard of any Americans trying to swim across the border into Mexico! — Bob Hope

In a museum in El Paso, Texas, there's a map that shows all the places the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been (because it shifted) - I find it very clarifying (not confusing) to be reminded that everything we feel like we've really pinned down is transient, arbitrary, and marks the site of a painful if not violent negotiation, one that may not have ended. — Laura Mullen

I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. — Donald Trump

We pay a subsidy. Money coming over the border, they're - there are so many ways that Mexico makes money with us, Bob. There are so many different ways, five in particular, that we will take it out of there. — Donald Trump

[I'm planning]for starters, build a permanent border wall between the US and Mexico that Mexico "must pay for". The plan proposes various sticks to force Mexico to cooperate, such as impounding all remittance payments to Mexico from illegal wages earned in the US. — Donald Trump

I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go - in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

On my recent trip to the Mexico border, Border Patrol agents in California told me they have arrested the same coyotes 20 times, but they are not prosecuted. — Ric Keller

My parents had irrational fears of Mexico and assumed that once you crossed the border, drug runners made you swallow a heroin balloon and then within the hour you were in a bathtub full of ice and they were harvesting your kidneys. — Justin Halpern

To give you an idea how bad the American economy is, Mexico is now calling for a fence along the border. Stay on your side! — Jay Leno

Colorado and Wyoming are America's highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado's lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River's' brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming's Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers. — Keith Meldahl

In 2006, the Secure Fence Act was signed into law, requiring the Department of Homeland Security to build upward of 700 miles of double layered fencing along the U. S-Mexico border. While the Obama administration is quick to state that the targets have been met, only a small fraction - in fact, less than 40 miles - of the newly implemented infrastructure is double-layered. — Duncan Hunter

I like Mexico. I love the Mexican people. I do business with the Mexican people, but you have people coming through the border that are from all over. And they're bad. They're really bad. — Donald Trump

Fences would be a hindrance to terrorists should they decide to come across a land border between the U.S. and Mexico and to California. — Duncan Hunter

The American craving for illegal, mind-altering, addictive chemicals provides a steady flow of American capital through the Texas border into Mexico and South America. Basically, the drug traffic is uncontainable as long as its U.S. market exists, but newspapers and other media virtuously trumpet feel-good headlines about "record drug busts" and arrests while the drug trade continues unabated. — William Earl Maxwell

In the White House now was James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist, who, on the night of his inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a challenge to the Mexicans. It was not at all clear that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of Texas, although Texas had forced the defeated Mexican general Santa Anna to say so when he was a prisoner. The traditional border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, about 150 miles to the north, and both Mexico and the United States had recognized that as the border. However, Polk, encouraging the Texans to accept annexation, had assured them he would uphold their claims to the Rio Grande. Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation. — Howard Zinn

I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling. — William T. Vollmann

Well, you know, the violence is mostly in Mexico itself, at least the violence that people are worried about. And so we want to make sure that violence does not spill over into our communities that are along the border. — Janet Napolitano

I believe we must resolve the problem at our southern border with full regard to the problems and needs of Mexico. I have suggested legalizing the entry of Mexican labor into this country on much the same basis you proposed, although I have not put it into the sense of restoring the bracero program. — Ronald Reagan

If he turned and ran, the border would follow, and the moment he turned around, there, one step behind him would be Mexico, staring him down with those eyes - — Cody Goodfellow

If you ask Americans whether they've been successful at sealing the border with Mexico, they'll tell you that it's a very difficult proposition. — Bashar Al-Assad

Notably, during this era, the notion of illegal immigration did not conjure the same political and legal consequences that it would after 1965 [...] The southern border of the United States was not militarized or guarded in the manner it would become in the late twentieth century, and seasonal, uncapped migration from Mexico was an accepted and expected labor reality. — Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between. — Nina Easton

My vision of the border with Mexico is that a truck from the United States going into Mexico and a truck coming from Mexico into the United States will pass each other at the border going 60 miles an hour. Yes, we should have open borders. — Gary Johnson

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they're telling us what we're getting. — Donald Trump

Mexico and the U.S. are bound not only because of the common border, but by a shared culture and history. — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

I think it's about time we legalize marijuana ... We either put people who are smoking marijuana behind bars or we legalize it, but this little game we are playing in the middle is not helping us, it is not helping Mexico and it is causing massive violence on our southern border ... Fifty percent of the money going to these cartels is coming just from marijuana coming across our border. — Glenn Beck

Border agents have now been issued air guns that shoot pepper balls at people coming across the Mexican border. Have they thought this through? Is that going to bother people from Mexico? Pepper balls? Don't these people eat jalapenos? Isn't that like firing meatballs at an Italian guy? — Jay Leno