The current issue of Newsweek has interviews with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Felipe Calderón, the Mexican presidential candidates. I’ll admit it — I’m an ignorant American — I’d never heard of them.
Anyway, I thought, based on this teeny tiny interview, that Calderón sounded like the saner choice, but my favorite thing he said was this:
I think it’s a mistake to believe that immigration will be solved by the National Guard or a new wall. The only way to reduce immigration is to create jobs in Mexico.
It’s a completely obvious statement, but I think the debate here is polarized between people who want to keep the immigrants out and people who want to let them in. Certainly it’s much easier to act within our own borders — even if it’s not very effective — but it’s not a good reason for ignoring the only approach that has any chance of achieving a long term satisfactory resolution. Maybe we should take what it would cost to build a wall and send the National Guard down there and just invest it in the Mexican economy.
Before you jump all over me, yes, I know it’s not that simple. But seriously. Think about it.
I see what you are getting at here, and it makes intuitive sense. It’s sort of like the process of osmosis — if we balance economic opportunity on both sides of the border, Mexican residents will stop diffusing to our side. The problem is that the U.S. already does invest a lot in Mexico. According to the State Department Web site, exports to the U.S. account for almost one-fourth of the GDP of Mexico, and the U.S. in 2003 made $5.75 billion in foreign direct investments to Mexico, 55% of the total for that year, not to mention the Peso bailout in 1994.
Immigration is an issue with which I have a difficult time because, on the one hand, world unification is something that must eventually happen, but, on the other hand, the U.S. cannot sustain the massive influx of undocumented immigrants pouring over the Mexican border. The problem isn’t necessarily that Mexican residents are coming here — as many have said, we need the labor force — it’s with the immigration process, which needs to be more orderly and controlled. That’s what must change in the near term.
As far as convincing Mexican residents determined to come to the U.S. not to come, that’s a more complicated issue, and, short of annexation, I’m not certain we can boost the Mexican economy in an adequately significant way. What I do know is that building walls and massing the National Guard at the border will not work — history (and osmosis) has long taught us that.