Things that make you go "hmmm"

Like many bloggers recently, I have commented on the fact that many of the states with large populations of undocumented Mexican workers were taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The war started in part because Mexico objected to the US admitting Mexico's breakaway state of Texas to the union (of course, Texas would secede from that union 15 years later--TWO chances not to have Texas in the US, and we blew both of them!). In addition, the US Army provocatively occupied and built a fort on disputed land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers. Really, of course, the war started because we had a pResident, James Polk, who really wanted one.

Then again--although California had been inhabited by the Spanish/Mexicans for nearly 200 years, and by Native Americans for centuries before that--gold was discovered there literally within months of when the US claimed California as part of the spoils of a war of choice. Or so the story goes.

Amazing coincidence, no? Hmmm.... Which way might the immigrants be going if California and its gold (and the other mineral-rich states) had remained a part of Mexico?