Ski,

All good points, but predicting the future is always a guessing game. One that I'll join you in.

Mexico for the issues you already addressed continues to spiral into a kleptocracy for two key reasons:

1. The State is broke, it can't reasonably protect its citizens, and can't provide essential services, so it has lost its legitimacy with its citizens, if they want to maintain any form of power (or the illusion of it) they need to reach out to the cartels and build their legitimacy with them.

2. Elections are bought and cartels have the money to buy the elections, and thus the politicians.

Mexico is now run by the families through their surrogate politicians.

This rapid demise of Mexico and the serious threat it poses to the U.S. will encourage the U.S. to militarize its southern border in order to contain the problem (it won't work). The the desparate Mexicans who desire to escape (illegally immigrate to the U.S.) will look more like the Cubans fleeing on make shift watercraft in the Gulf of Mexico or in the Pacific (where they risk becoming a meal for the rather large great white population in that region). Yet the drugs and money will flow through alternative means that are more sosphisticated and bypass our S. border. They'll also continue to smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S. who can afford to pay for it (like the many they have already smuggling into the U.S. from the Middle East).

Violence and corruption are spreading into the US in the forms of gangs (MS 13 and M 18). Corruption rates in the Border Patrol, ICE and local law enforcement departments have been rising steadily since 2005.
Violence and corruption will continue to spread throughout Norte America via the vast Latino-American street gangs and Mexican mafia social plague already well established in most urban areas and currently seeping into rural areas as well. They can either buy cooperation or get it through coercion. Would you like to find your kid's head in your mailbox senor?

By now the majority of the world's global market is either gray or black, so governments have less of tax base, thus less and less resources to combat these trends. The corrosive effect begins to pick off our cities, counties and states one by one.

Of course this is a worst case, grade B movie, speculation, but not entirely unfeasible IMO.

What's the alternative scenario? What do we need to do to reverse this trend?