Mexico not the hell activist claims it to be

BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Opening shot

Never been to Mexico. Been close: San Diego. Just north of the border. Went there to interview Tom Landry, the late Cowboys coach. He was very religious. We spoke of God and football.

The evening was my own, however, and thoughts of faith far away. I considered driving into Tijuana. But rattling around Tijuana by myself for a night seemed a Bad Idea, and the same self-protective instinct that keeps clams in their shells told me to stay put at the hotel.

So I haven't been to Mexico. I understand it is a much poorer nation than the United States, and many Mexicans eagerly abandon it to come here to work and live, finding this country an improvement over their former home.

But Mexico isn't hell, right? A hundred million people live there, often lives of richness and satisfaction. Right? Because you wouldn't know it, not the way that activist Elvira Arellano, holed up at a Humboldt Park church, has been carrying on. The way she -- or rather her lawyer -- has been talking, you'd think perdition awaits her and her son south of the border.

I don't want to romanticize the place -- as I said, I've never been there. But I don't think I'm going out on a limb betting it's somewhere a woman can live and raise a child -- heck, she already speaks Spanish, which is helpful in Mexico. Or so I hear.

And today's new right is ...

One last thing -- people are always conjuring new rights for themselves. Flattering to the ideal of American freedom, I suppose. But the truth is that freedom goes only so far. Your right to make a fist, as a legal light once said, ends at the tip of my nose.

Arellano's son certainly doesn't have the right as an American citizen to keep his mother from being deported to Mexico. There's nothing in the Constitution about having mom at hand. If that right existed, then no parent could ever be sent to jail. The government can put mothers in prison, it can execute them, it can certainly send them to Mexico, which is not as bad as prison or death. Or so I presume.

There is a thudding lack of sympathy for the woman. This space normally stands tall for immigrants -- but it draws the line at dreaming up new rights where none exist. Or dragging God into police matters.