The military has been eyeballing that possibility for years. It's been in the back of our mind (far in the back usually) for pretty much our entire
history. The Brits established Georgia as a debtors colony to be a buffer zone against Spanish Florida. This was not only a matter of military defense
however, but also included concern over the area being a haven for runaway slaves, and also concern over French trading posts swaying the loyalty of
Indians there, which can be seen in part as an 18th century analogy for modern fears about smugglers and gangs (not comparing Indians to gangs
exactly, don't get me wrong).
A weak Mexico that couldn't control it's Northern provinces also prompted US policies friendly to the freebooters who eventually gained Texas its
independence, ultimately leading to the Mexican-American War.
Then of course there was the Zimmerman Note.
And more recently Cap Weinberger included it in
The Next War back during the Clinton years, but that doesn't really tell the whole story of
how far back this obsession goes; you've got to remember that Cap wasn't in the Clinton admin. Reagan's Sec Def was writing about it in the mid 90s
because he had already spent the better part of the 80s thinking about it. In the late 60s they had students calling for a revolution. In the first
half of the 70s they had a mildly Hugo-Chavez-esque president in Echeverria. And then right when he was gone, the peso dropped by half even as Mexico
became an oil exporter, which ultimately just gave Echeverria's successor more money to squander, which by the 80s only made things worse, as the end
of the 70s and the attendant oil crises meant the end of the one thing keeping them afloat.
en.wikipedia.org...
Once Echeverría became president, he embarked on a far-reaching program of populist political and economic reform, nationalizing the mining and
electrical industries, redistributing private land in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora to peasants, opposing American "expansionism," supporting the
leftist Chilean leader Salvador Allende, condemning Zionism, allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to open an office in the capital, and
imposing limits on foreign investment, and extending Mexico's patrimonial waters to 200 miles (370 km).
My point is:
This ain't new by a damn sight. Mexico is gonna find itself in deep economic doo-doo again thanks to inflation and an unstable oil market and the US
is going to open its checkbook and buy peace again, at the expense of American labor and taxpayers, just like 1994. Thank god nothing ever seems to
change. Otherwise all of my knowledge of history would be useless, eh?
At the first sign of eminent collapse in Mexico (not just possible collapse, as we have had almost without interruption since at least 1976) America
will completely open its border, thus siphoning off all of the young unemployed men that it takes to run a revolution. That's probably why we
haven't fixed the border problem...
Well, that and the fact that putting immigrants on welfare is a defacto subsidy of American retailers, in that it brings in additional consumers and
provides them with money to spend at our retailers even when there aren't jobs to allow for this to occur naturally- but that's a whole different
thread.
I bet if you had someone who knows what all those extra buttons on a graphing calculator are for (that ain't me), you could come up with an equasion
that factors in inflation, oil prices, and unemployment in Mexico, and accordingly predicts the intensity and direction of US border policy. If I'm
right about that, we can also predict that the Obama presidency will bear striking resemblance to the Clinton presidency in many respects, both
directly and indirectly related to this matter (Such matters are prominent among most of our memories of Clinton's first term, I'm sure).
From where we stand, things don't look good for you guys. We wonder if
you will not find yourselves within a failed state with martial law and FEMA camps. Maybe that border wall was built to keep you guys in after all.
Don't get me wrong, we still love you. We are concerned. At least here when something is missing at the store, we can always fall back on " manana"
they will have it, instead of freaking out. 
