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Americans, by and large, are not a selfish people. While we contribute billions to scores of charities every year, our government acts as one of the world's most generous benefactors. Washington's foreign aid payments alone overshadow some nations' annual budgets.

In terms of relations with our southern neighbor, much of our economic foreign policy in this hemisphere has been a direct benefit to Mexico City. The North American Free Trade Agreement (which, by the way, was supposed to curb illegal immigration), has been worth hundreds of billions of dollars to Mexico, while costing the U.S. in terms of job and economic loss.

NAFTA is just one example. Remember the 1995 Mexican peso bailout? While the International Monetary Fund is credited with providing the actual funding, a substantial portion of Washington's nearly $14 billion annual foreign aid budget goes to the IMF and World Bank.

On top of all this, the State Department says the U.S. government provided more than $33 million in stand-alone foreign aid to Mexico last year alone.

Yet Mexican leaders and politicians, in tandem with U.S. immigrant "rights" groups and sympathetic legislators, bemoan the U.S. is not doing enough for these "selfless" migrants, most of whom are supposedly doing so much good for the American economy. Some Mexican leaders, President Vicente Fox, are so focused on pawning off their nations' economic problems on U.S. taxpayers they have even gone so far as to insult American minority groups.

You want to talk bottom line? Well here it is. There is nothing "cheap" about the Mexican "cheap labor" myth, especially if you're an American taxpayer.

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Jon E. Dougherty is author of Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border, and editor of Voices Magazine [www.voicesmag.com].

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.

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