The United States shares the tenth longest international boundary, nearly 2,000 miles, with its Southern neighbor, Mexico.
In a world fraught with so many international crises and issues, the last thing the United States needs is to have tensions, and the danger of a real conflict with Mexico.
This tension is all due to Donald Trump, the GOP Presidential nominee, with his crude depictions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and his demand that a wall be built, with his insistence that Mexico will pay for the wall.
At a time when immigration is down from Mexico, Trump is threatening a deportation force to remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. He seems unable to get the point that trying to build a wall is logistically unrealistic, and that the cost would be extremely high, and trying to demand that Mexico would pay, could lead to bloodshed and growing dangers of terrorism, even more dangerous than the ongoing battle against the Mexican Drug Cartels.
We have had two particularly difficult periods in our history in relations with Mexico, and the resentments on the Mexican side remain from the Mexican-American War of 1846=1848 under President James K. Polk, and the conflict under Woodrow Wilson during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, which led to the Punitive Expedition invasion of Mexico under General John. J. Pershing in 1916-1917, after bandit Pancho Villa invaded Columbus, New Mexico in March 1916. The Mexican government collaboration with Imperial Germany, leading to the revelation of the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917, which helped to push America into World War I, also inflamed emotions.
Due to Donald Trump, we are now entering what can be seen as the most dangerous time in US-Mexican relations in the past hundred years.