New World Order, Old Worldview : U.S.-Mexico: A joint attack is needed on science-related issues, but ‘security’ still dominates our foreign spending.

Uncontrolled migration, severe trans-border air and water pollution, trade barriers, foreign-policy disputes, the Alamo: The relationship between the United States and Mexico is complex and marked by controversy and misunderstanding. Like Siamese twins constantly trying to move in different directions, the United States and Mexico have never been able to reconcile their ambitions with the fact that they are physically inseparable.

The U.S.-Mexico free-trade negotiations may help to define a range of common goals and thus help create a new, shared vision. But this means that benefits to the United States from free trade cannot come at the expense of Mexico; on the contrary, the ultimate success of the agreement will be tied as closely to Mexico’s prosperity as to our own. With the average Mexican worker earning 10% of what a U.S. worker earns, significantly increased trade with the United States hinges on rapid, sustainable growth of Mexico’s economy.

In this context, it is impossible to understand the Bush Administration’s refusal to provide funds for an innovative program that would establish an endowment for cooperative scientific research with Mexico. The 1991 foreign operations bill included an appropriation of up to $20 million for this program. So far, the State Department has refused to allocate a single dollar.

The Administration has gone out of its way to promote scientific research as the key to solving a wide range of technological, health, energy and environmental problems and at the same time fuel an expanding U.S. economy. The Administration’s 1991 budget proposal to Congress justified our $70-billion federal investment in research and development in precisely these terms: “Research and development yields new knowledge, products and processes that, over the long term, result in economic growth and improved quality of life for all Americans.”

I couldn’t agree more. But if this is true for the United States, isn’t it also true for Mexico? Of course it is. After a fact-finding visit to Mexico in 1988, members of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, unless the steady deterioration of Mexico’s research and education system soon was reversed, “the potential contribution of science and technology to Mexico’s economic and social development will certainly not be realized.”

The U.S.-Mexico research program embodies many of the partnership principles that the President claims to support. A federal investment of $20 million could leverage more than $50 million in program support through matching funds and a “debt-for-science” swap with Mexico.

These funds would be used to create an endowment for the support of joint U.S.-Mexico research on problems of urgent and mutual interest, such as arid-land agriculture, urban mass transit, biotechnology and science education. Furthermore, research could focus on a range of serious environmental problems that we share, such as the severe water and air pollution along much of our 2,000-mile border.

In the longer term, economic growth built on research and development is the key to solving problems of underemployment, immigration and “brain drain” that hinder Mexico’s development prospects and generate stress and antagonism between Mexico and the United States.

This program makes so much sense that our ambassador to Mexico, the President’s science adviser and the administrator for science at the U.S. Agency for International Development all advised the State Department to support it. It makes so much sense that the Mexican government wants to match--or exceed--any U.S. government contribution to the program.

Why, then, does the Administration refuse to fund it? The State Department claims that “pressures on the international affairs budget make it very difficult to provide support.” False. This week the department is expected to decide how to reallocate more than $200 million in foreign-aid funds that had been earmarked for Pakistan but must be spent elsewhere because Pakistan refuses to curtail its nuclear-weapons-development program. A small percentage of these funds could easily be devoted to U.S.-Mexico research.

The real explanation lies in the State Department’s old world philosophy of foreign assistance, which still views national security in the context of military struggle and a steady supply of imported oil. Department policy refuses to acknowledge that long-term, sustainable economic development cannot exist in nations that lack a vigorous system of scientific and technological research.

The “new world order” envisioned by President Bush requires new world thinking at the Department of State. The benefits of a free-trade agreement will never be fully realized without substantially increased levels of scientific and technological cooperation between Mexico and the United States.