Amid the national hysteria over American immigration and border security policy, many appear to be missing the potential massive impact that the coming elections in Mexico will have on these policies, along with the impact the election will have on U.S.-Mexico relations and the cooperation that is ultimately needed to end the crisis at the southern border.

Mexicans will head to the ballot box on July 1 to elect a new president. According to polling, far-left politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the clear favorite to lock up the presidency. Recent polls show that he consistently garners over 50 percent of expected voters’ support. His closest rival, Ricardo Anaya, registers around 25 percent support on average in recent polls.

López Obrador is not only a committed leftist, but he appears to be fiercely anti-American. As someone who rose through the political ranks attached to communist and socialist revolutionary politics, he has been described as the ideological “twin” of radical leftist British politician Jeremy Corbyn.

On the campaign trail, the front-runner has branded himself as a fierce nationalist and populist who wants to distance his country from the U.S. His leftist nationalism has drawn comparisons to the rhetoric of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

López Obrador has in the past pledged to stop all security cooperation with the United States. During the Trump presidency, his anti-American rhetoric has only increased.

In January, he pledged that if he were elected, he would put President Trump “in his place.” The next month, he said he would seek United Nations intervention to stop the United States from securing its southern border with Mexico.

“If he insists on building the wall, we’re going to turn to the United Nations to defend the rights of Mexicans. I’m conscious of my historic responsibility,” López Obrador said in a February debate.

“Mexico and its people will not be the piñata of any foreign government,” López Obrador said in a May speech targeting the United States. “It’s not with walls or use of force that you resolve social problems.”

However, in recent weeks, as his lead continues to climb, López Obrador has notably softened his tone.

Last week, López Obrador said he believes he can use diplomacy to convince the president to back off on his border wall policy.

It remains to be seen which ideology López Obrador will embrace should he become Mexico’s next president. Will his revolutionary impulses lead to the destruction of relations with the United States, or will his nationalist-centrist campaign result in a president who respects the sovereignty of his neighbor to the north? (For more from the author of “Anti-U.S. Leftist Expected to Become Next Mexican President” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Since Mexico’s election season was launched in September, at least 82 candidates and politicians have been murdered according to Reuters and security consulting firm Etellekt. . .

Given the power of Mexico’s drug cartels, it’s unsurprising that the victims of these assassinations come from an array of political parties. Experts believe that gangs are behind the killings in an effort to intimidate lawmakers — and further infiltrate the government with politicians who are corruptible and will show them favor.

Vincente Sanchez, a professor of public administration at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana told The Daily Mail: “Criminal gangs want to be sure that in the next government, they can maintain their power networks, which is why they are increasing attacks.”

Such slayings have become all too common in Mexico of late. After five politicians were killed within a week around the turn of the new year, the country’s president of the National Association of Mayors declared, “We have called on the president asking for an immediate meeting to implement a security protocol for mayors. The insecurity cannot continue this way in our country.” . . .

While short on resources, Mexican authorities have started to provide security for candidates. But Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said, “State and local authorities are outgunned and outmaneuvered and the federal forces cannot be everywhere. There is an urgent need…to provide greater protection and insulation against organized crime.” (Read more from “Mexico Faces Power Struggle as Politicians Are Constantly Murdered” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How many electoral votes does California hold in Mexico’s elections?

If you are not already outraged by the insidious ways the Mexican government undermines our sovereignty, pay attention to a recent story about a Mexican presidential candidate campaigning in California for votes in his home country’s election. There are now enough Mexican nationals – legal and illegal – living in California that Mexican candidates campaign there as if it were a “swing province” of Mexico itself.

But that’s not even the point.

While campaigning in California for “overseas” votes, Ricardo Anaya Cortes blasted Donald Trump and met with liberal activists to promote “Dream” amnesty. Cortes said in one of his speeches, as reported by the Center for Immigration Studies:

I want to ask you, with my heart in my hand, that every time you hear an aggressive or denigrating expression, remember that there, in Mexico, you are the heroes of the country, the brave, the enterprising, the generous, those who dared to cross the border to give their family a better future. Do not you forget that you are not alone … all of Mexico is with you and when I am President I will always be on your side.

Cortez reportedly told a group of Mexican nationals that he would always side with them over “an American president who has dedicated himself to insulting our community.”

Think about that: this man is seeking the votes of Mexican nationals living in the United States under the promise of being tough with Trump and advocating that these very same people become Americans and vote in American elections?

They can’t have it both ways. If they care about their people, they should stop sending them here and doing everything possible through their consulates to circumvent our immigration laws and enforcement. And if they badly want them to be Americans, why do they continue to treat them as Mexicans and seek their votes? Obviously, they want their votes but don’t want the responsibility of taking care of them. They’d rather we do that, on our dime.

Also, weren’t we told that the “dreamers” “know no other country but America?” Why would they be voting in Mexico’s elections?

There is something fundamentally wrong when a foreign presidential candidate can come here and urge American residents to vote for him so he can use his diplomatic tools to undermine America’s laws and sovereignty.

Dual voting is an affront to American sovereignty and violates the immigration principles of all sides of this debate

The problem of our stolen sovereignty and immigrants’ lack of assimilation runs much deeper than illegal immigrants or unnaturalized legal immigrants voting in Mexican elections. There are well over 1 million naturalized U.S. citizens voting in Mexican elections, many of whom likely live in California, according to a 2014 report by the Los Angeles Times editorial board. This practice is likely illegal and should be abolished.

Advocates of open borders virtue-signal about the need to open our arms to all those who want to become Americans. Great, so let’s all become Americans. When immigrants complete their naturalization process, they must swear an oath with the emphatic commitment to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Liberals often remind us about our “traditions on immigration,” but this law and tradition is as old as America’s Founding. The language to abjure and abandon the new citizen’s former sovereign was officially codified into the Naturalization Act of 1795.

There has long been a heated debate over the concept and practice of holding dual citizenship. Let’s put that debate aside for the moment. Many countries, due to their citizenship laws, very loosely throw citizenship at the children of their expatriates living abroad. I’m not suggesting that we force every American, especially naturally born Americans, to actively renounce that other citizenship. But what we should all agree upon is that we must enforce the law and the oath of allegiance so that no dual citizen takes active steps to vote in foreign elections, in violation of that sacred oath. The entire concept violates not only the letter of the law but the entire spirit of welcoming immigrants.

I would argue that such an act should be grounds for de-naturalization by retroactively rendering the oath fraudulent, much like we de-naturalize those who obtained citizenship through fraudulent circumstances.

The courts should not serve as an obstacle to reclaiming sovereignty

But alas, there’s a court case behind every backward policy. The lawless Supreme Court of the Warren era ruled (Efroyim v. Rusk, 1967) that Congress cannot de-naturalize someone who votes in a foreign election, a violation of previous court precedent. However, this ruling needs to be revisited. Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority in upholding Congress’ right to de-naturalize in this circumstance a decade earlier (Perez v. Brownell, 1958), got it right when he observed how dual voting undermines foreign relations and is well within the province of congressional power to regulate:

[T]he activities of the citizens of one nation when in another country can easily cause serious embarrassments to the government of their own country as well as to their fellow citizens. We cannot deny to Congress the reasonable belief that these difficulties might well become acute, to the point of jeopardizing the successful conduct of international relations, when a citizen of one country chooses to participate in the political or governmental affairs of another country. The citizen may by his action unwittingly promote or encourage a course of conduct contrary to the interests of his own government.

This rationale is evident from comments by one of these Mexican nationals quoted in the Dallas Morning News as saying that she is voting in the Mexican elections to counter what is going on here in the United States. “Of course I’m voting; especially with the situation with the United States, Mexican leadership is important,” she said. “What’s at stake in Mexico’s upcoming election is the battle for stability amidst a wave of rising nationalism.”

In the meantime, the Trump administration should use all the tools of statecraft to discourage rather than encourage this practice. The Mexican consulates undermine our sovereignty in many ways and recently has allowed Mexican nationals to obtain voter IDs on our soil without going home. We can place restrictions on such policies for U.S. citizens. Alternatively, Congress can officially criminalize foreign voting of naturalized citizens as a violation of the citizenship oath but stop short of using de-naturalization as a punishment and opting for a fine instead. At the very least, we should prospectively make this a condition on the application for naturalization.

This is a growing problem because in recent years Mexico and Central America – the countries that supply us with the most immigrants – have liberally granted citizenship to children of those living abroad. Thanks to the rule change, there are now seven times as many Mexican citizens living in America who can vote in this Mexican presidential election compared with Mexico’s last election in 2012. Many of them are not yet American citizens or are illegal aliens, but at least the naturalized U.S. citizens should be barred from voting in foreign elections.

Even more offensive, so many of these dual nationals are anchor babies who only obtained citizenship in America through their parents’ violation of our laws and a misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As I note in great detail in Chapter 4 of my book, our Constitution, laws, and history are clear that birthright citizenship can only apply to legal immigrants who are brought here with the consent of the citizenry. Citizenship can never be asserted without the consent of the citizenry.

Those who extol the virtues of mass migration often chide us about the need to reach out to those who yearn to become Americans. Well, this is a simple test. Anyone who truly wants to become an American and abide by the oath of citizenship should have no problem surrendering his right to vote in foreign elections.

There is nothing of greater importance to the American people than the preservation of American citizenship and national sovereignty. If the people don’t reclaim control over citizenship and instead allow the courts and the political elites to concoct a birthright for anyone in the world to claim for their children at will – while continuing to leverage their former countries against our own government – the sovereignty of the American people and the birthright of American citizens will be forever lost.

Then again, if California wants to continue its neo-confederate ways, it may as well make it official and become the northernmost province of Mexico. (For more from the author of “Mexican Presidential Candidate: Vote for Me, California!” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.