If you're wondering why the Mexican response to the caravaners' border riot Sunday was so swift – with Mexican-side border reinforcements, 500 arrests, 69 criminal charges filed, and 98 on-the-spot deportations – look no farther than this NBC News item, dug up from the Mexican press:

A poll released Sunday by El Universal, one of Mexico's biggest newspapers, found seven in 10 Mexicans have a negative view about the arrival of the migrant families, with more than half – 52 percent – supporting blocking them from entering the country without legal documents and 55 percent supporting tougher measures on future caravans.

Support for the migrant families has also dropped in the last few months, the survey found.  This has implications for President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1: About half, 52 percent, of Mexicans opposed his announced measure to give work visas to Central American migrants, while 40 percent support the measure.

This, by the way, was what the Mexicans thought before the riot.  One can only guess how high the number is now, given the costly border shutdown, which local news here in San Diego pegged at $5 million in lost sales for the few hours of shutdown, but another piece of buried news dug up by NBC is likely indicative.

Mexicans went after the rioting caravan migrants with "bats and sticks" on Sunday.  According to NBC News:

After the shutdown, some Tijuana residents and business owners came out with bats and sticks and threatened the migrants.

"They should not be here in Tijuana," an upset resident told Mexican authorities.

The fury at the border shutdown obviously drove some over the edge.  And NBC tried to bury that aspect of its story as, you know, unimportant.  Left unsaid, their targets were arrogant, unemployed, entitlement mentality-minded, military-aged young men who served as shock troops for the Chavista far-left project the migrant caravan amounts to.

NBC7 screenshot photo from the television.

Obviously, the Mexicans see it for what it is: a foreign invasion.  They also don't like the crime, the garbage, the pestilence, and the lawlessness the caravan has brought.  They don't like the special treatment – free food, jobs, medical care, and legalization the migrants are getting, while Tijuana's poor continue to get nothing.  Some of them went off the deep end, which signals how deep a well of discontent this frustration springs from.

What's more, it shows how badly the initial press reports were about the protests, claiming that last week's Tijuana protesters were merely a few locals complaining on social media, who by no means represented the majority.  Hadn't Mexicans just given out free food to the passing migrants from the journey farther south?  NPR reported that last Sunday's Tijuana protests amounted to just "a few hundred."

It turns out there were a lot more of them than that.

Now NBC is reporting that they are so numerous that they are likely to affect the administrative course of incoming left-wing populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who take office on Dec. 1.  What's a populist if he doesn't do things that are popular?  They are going to want AMLO to stop this, and odds are, he will, if for nothing else, then to tweak his weakling predecessors.

This poll represents a sea change in Mexican sentiment toward illegals, which in turn is an obstacle to the Democrats back here in the states.  The Mexicans do still seem to have the hooks in California's state government, which is promising "free" health care to illegal aliens and already doles out many goodies.  But as Democrats and their political activist and left-wing lawyer allies nationally seek to open borders and undermine rule of law to expand the welfare state and secure votes here, they're going to find a wall of opposition from our south.  Mexico is no longer shipping large numbers of illegal aliens, and now public attitudes there are changing in one of the sharpest U-turns in public sentiment I've ever seen.

Not surprisingly, the migrants are starting to pack up and go home.

Image credit: NBC7 San Diego news broadcast screenshot.