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If there is anything people hate more than buying a used car, filling out tax forms, or visiting their attorney's office it is meeting the glassy eyed enthusiasm of some acquaintance who wants to recruit you into a multi-level-marketing scheme. You know the ones. If you can make a list of everyone you know, and they can make a list of everyone they know, and each of you spend a few hundred dollars a month on some assorted widget or another, in three to five years you could be living on your own Caribbean island.

Fortunately, in the United States, the worst of these Ponzi pyramid schemes are illegal. But, imagine for a moment if they were not. Imagine also if, rather than toothpaste, insurance, and Saint John's Wort, the product you were purchasing was the right to build a shed in your back yard, open a business, or avoid police harassment? And, what if this extortion was institutionalized to the point that it became the price of trying to live a normal life?

This is the case of the average citizen of Mexico. In 2005, a survey conducted by Transparency International showed that between 31 and 45% of Mexicans had someone in their family forced to pay a bribe to a public official in the past year.

Corruption is an endemic aspect of Mexican government. Extending from the local police who routinely shake down people who commit minor infractions for cash all the way to top government officials who habitually cut deals with political cronies and drug traffickers to shape Mexican law.

After endless decades, this culture of corruption has taken its toll. Over 20% of the Mexican population lives in poverty, only 62% of people have access to clean drinking water, 25% of the economy is illegal, and in the oil rich state of Chiapas; 40% of all homes have dirt floors and 21% have no electricity. All in a country with a $1 trillion gross domestic product.

Mexico has all the resources to develop a successful economy and enable its citizens to earn a comfortable, modern life, but chooses not to do so for the simple fact that the government is unwilling to stop enriching themselves at the expense of average people.

Faced with these realities, is it any wonder 46% of the Mexican population would like to immigrate to the United States?

It would seem obvious that any responsible government in Mexico's situation would take steps to fight the corruption that is ruining the lives of so many of its citizens, reform itself, and reverse these trends. Mexican President Vicente Fox tried after he was elected in 2000, but all of his reform efforts failed soon after the Mexican bureaucracy realized that reform would mean they would have to stop running back to the cash cows of extortion, bribery and illegal kickbacks that have financed their lifestyles.

But now, President Fox has found an answer to solving the problems of a stagnating economy and crushing poverty that does not require him to confront Mexico's political corruption: illegal immigration.

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