I guess I should have said help Mexico without hurting us. It is to our advantage to keep people in their own country except for special circumstances.
Sending our jobs south was stupid. We cannot repeat that mistake. We did not help Mexico to develop its own resources and peoples. Had we done so, we could be more equal trading partners with them.
We didn't just send our jobs to Mexico.
We also sent them billions of our US taxpayer dollars, supposedly to help Mexico develop it's own resources and peoples, just like you suggest.
See: Partnership for Prosperity - US Embassy Mexico City
See: Sociedad para la Prosperidad (Prosperity for the Society)
Guess what? It didn't make any difference. Mexicans still came here illegally. The real purpose behind the P4P and New Alliance Task Force (NATF) was to attract Mexican illegal aliens to the USA and into the US banking system. The money we sent south of the border went straight into the pockets of the Mexican ruling elite.
The P4P and NATF led directly to the sub-prime lending debacle which led directly to the deepest recession this country has seen since the Great Depression.
This occurred because not only did we give these illegal aliens easy access to the US banking system, including home loans, but we also gave them (courtesy of George W. Bush and the US taxpayer) money for the down payment.
So, when the economy took a nose-dive, they all left for Mexico because they had no investments to make them want to stay put.
See: Linking International Remittance Flows to Financial Services: Tapping the Latino Immigrant Market