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The article’s claim that goods are cheaper in places like Mexico is not necessarily accurate. One of the reasons Mexico remains poor and underdeveloped is the oligopolistic market its politicians and wealthy families perpetuate. Many goods are more expensive in Mexico. When Walmart came along, it lowered the price of a bollilo (a common bread), for instance, to less than a peso (about ten cents). The price before had often been 2 to 4 pesos. Certainly Telmex, the near monopoly phone company owned by the richest man in the world (Senor Slim) is doing very well. Residential internet line around $50. In the US internet services start at around $10 per month and increasew from there. Technological services are not cheaper than in the US and food you feel safe eating is more expensive here. That is why many Mexicans travel to the US side Walmart, where the food prices are better and so is the quality. (Import taxes keep many products out of the Walmarts inside Mexico.)

Third world countries are not the uniformly less expensive — except when it comes to real estate. And this author is getting data from someplace other than the real world if that is his conclusion.

The article’s claim that goods are cheaper in places like Mexico is not necessarily accurate.

What the article said was, "For another, many goods in less developed economies such as China and Mexico are much cheaper than they are in countries such as the United States."

Baja, excellent post. Few people realize that Mexico has FAR from a free market. It may have given up on complete "import substitution" (a fancy word for protectionism) but Mexican law effectively encourages duopolies/monopolies in the interest of "stability" and the "national economy."

It never ceases to amaze me how many Freepers these days want to adopt the economic policy of import substition which was so popular in Latin America and much of Asia from the 1950s until the late 1980s. For all their ranting about "third world immigrants" (and, I must interject here, that I am for deporting ALL illegals myself), they certainly want to adopt the protectionist policies so popular in the Third World until relatively recently.