Mission to Mexico

On her first official trip to Mexico beginning today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will confront a range of bilateral issues and tensions: drug violence, trade and immigration, among others. Times editorial writer Marjorie Miller asked experts on both sides of the 2,000-mile border to discuss issues likely to come up on the two-day visit. Here are their edited responses.

Mayor of Rosarito, Mexico, and owner of the Rosarito Beach Hotel

I wish the Obama administration would recognize the effort we are making to clean up our cities, our police forces, our state and country. Certain elements in the U.S. government have reacted very quickly in telling people not to come to Mexico, talking only about the problems we have and that we have a lot of narcos. We do, but you have more over there. Our criminals sell the drugs wholesale, you distribute them retail, and the amount of money handled by U.S. distributors is probably 10 times as much.

-- Hugo Torres Chabert

For our city in particular, the travel warning is a big problem. We have had lots of killings. But 96% of the killings in our area were between traffickers. That also happens in New Orleans and Baltimore and other cities with high crime rates. But all of a sudden, there is a campaign to stay away from Mexico. We haven’t had any tourist or visitor caught in a crossfire in 20 years. We have 20 million visitors a year in Baja California, so really the risk is not there for a tourist. Yet in Rosarito, we have lost about 70% of tourists since the middle of last year.

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John Cook

Mayor of El Paso

I hope there is very candid discussion about what’s fueling the money and arms for the drug wars. One thing we need is some kind of commitment from the U.S. as to how we’re going to inspect southbound traffic. Currently we don’t have that. Thousands of trucks a day travel from Juarez into El Paso and then make the trip back. This causes congestion on Interstate 10, and that’s without stopping every vehicle for an inspection. If we were to start inspecting them, we would have traffic congestion for miles down the freeway at rush hour. One solution would be to use gamma ray technology, which we are using on northbound traffic. We run all of these big trucks through the gamma ray, and we can see what kind of cargo they have; we can see concealed compartments in the trailers and if there’s a pallet of money or a pallet of weapons. The money we would end up confiscating could be used to make improvements to the ports of entry.

A second issue Mexico and the United States need to talk about is commerce. The lack of demand for consumer products on this side has had a significant impact on the economy of places like Juarez and Chihuahua. For example, Electrolux had 3,000 employees in Mexico. But as the demand for refrigerators drops on this side, they lay people off on their side, and we’ve seen high unemployment on the other side of the border. That’s meant a decline in shopping and tourism from the south to the north. Our revenues for El Paso will be $9 million short of what they were projected to be. That’s because the Mexican shoppers are not coming over here.

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Jose Reyes Ferriz

Mayor of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

What we saw from the previous administration was the building of a wall, trying to isolate the United States from Mexico to keep the problems outside. That doesn’t work. There must be a recognition by both governments that we are facing joint problems and that the only way we’ll be able to solve those problems is working together to bring about a solution.

The problem right now is organized crime. The major problem we have is the sale of guns in the United States without regard to the fact that those guns are going to be illegally smuggled into Mexico. This needs to be investigated by the United States.

The second point that needs to be addressed is money. The activities by organized crime in Mexico are financed with drug money coming in from the United States. Money-laundering investigations need to be stepped up so the flow of money into those illegal activities stops. And when organized crime goes unchecked, it ventures into new areas. We have seen some organized crime getting into the trafficking of persons, helping illegals go into the United States.

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Wayne Cornelius

Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UC San Diego

It’s very clear that the Obama administration is not going to get to comprehensive immigration reform this year. There are simply too many distractions. So if you’re not going to do immigration reform, what do you do? You suggest that you are responsive to the drug violence and respond to very strong criticism from the Hispanic Caucus and the pro-immigration lobby’s criticism of the work-site raids that have taken place in recent years. What they’re saying, and I agree strongly, is that conducting raids affects mostly migrant workers themselves; it does not create a systematic deterrent to employers. It would be better to do more workplace audits, to ramp up the enforcement of the existing employer-sanctions law, rather than do these pinprick raids. You audit the hiring records and make sure the Social Security numbers on those forms coincide with what’s in the federal database.

I would focus on cooperative development alternatives to migration. We need to get a start on that, and even though there isn’t a huge constituency for that approach in Congress, it’s something that Mexico would take as a very constructive sign.

That is an approach whose time has come. It’s going to require cooperation with Mexico and the international organizations that operate in rural Mexico. It’s certainly more cost-effective than what we’re doing.

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Raymundo Riva Palacio

Editor of the online newspaper Eje Central

Mexicans object to our country being called a “failed state.” It touches our nationalistic nerve. Nevertheless, we do have a failed state. There are more than 100 municipalities controlled by the drug cartels. In some cities, like in Tamaulipas, the cartels provide protection, control prostitution, charge drug taxes. There are a number of mayors working with them, and dozens of local policemen on their payroll.

The problem is that it is very easy to get away with criminal activity in Mexico. There’s no real incentive to follow the rule of law, and there are a lot incentives not to. The costs for criminal activity are still too low. The U.S. can apply political pressure, but this is basically a Mexican problem we have to solve internally.

People in Mexico love President Obama, even if he doesn’t know anything about Mexico. He’s never been in Mexico, even as a tourist. We also like Hillary, but she doesn’t really understand either. Mexico is going to be disappointed.

When Obama says he is going to propose immigration reform, we think it’s going to be the whole enchilada. Since the Democratic convention, however, we have known that what they are talking about is giving a very limited number of permanent residents amnesty. Those who want to apply have to prove how long they were there, pay taxes and penalties, go back to the source country and apply there. But we are thinking of a general amnesty for Mexicans, which is never going to happen. So whatever happens will be a disappointment.--

Shannon K. O’Neil

Douglas Dillon fellow for Latin America studies, Council on Foreign Relations

We are Mexico’s largest export market; 80% to 85% of their exports go to the United States. They’re the second-largest consumer of our exports after Canada. Some estimates say that 2 million U.S. jobs depend on exports to Mexico. So, how their economy fares affects jobs here in the United States. Obviously we need to figure out how to stimulate our own economy, but we should also be thinking about our closest neighbor not only for their stability but because our economy depends on them.

We’ve seen some rough patches in the last couple of weeks with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the end of funding for a pilot program allowing certified Mexican truckers to come to the United States.

Under NAFTA, part of our obligation was to open up the trucking system to Mexican truckers. We’ve dragged our feet for several years and now just shut down that program, and that’s led to retaliation on the Mexican side. I would like to see us come together and find a way to move forward.

My feeling is that it would be very difficult for any of the governments to renegotiate NAFTA. But there are things you can do on a bilateral basis that could be negotiated. NAFTA focused solely on goods and not on the movement of people, which often follows from the movement of goods. We have side agreements on labor, but you could really strengthen them so they have real teeth.

Obviously we don’t have a lot of money for foreign assistance. But there are ways we can be smart about economic development in Mexico. This is the root of a lot of tensions in our relationship, be it migration, the drug trade, other illegal industries, and a lot of those in part come from the lack other legal economic opportunities in Mexico. The fact that there aren’t formal jobs means people migrate to find formal jobs, often in illicit economies.