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A New Era In U.S. - Mexico Relations?

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg in Southern California, in Claremont. Mexico, America, more immigration, more trade, a new politics, lots of change. We are here to explore and to argue.

Think Tank is joined by Jorge Bustamente, President of Colegio del la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Mexico, and author of a recent study on immigration between Mexico and the United States; Peter Skerry, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of Counting on the Census: Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics; and Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The topic before the house, change in Mexico and America, this week on Think Tank.

More immigrants arrive in America from Mexico than from any other country. A total of about 300,000 each year, legal and illegal, seeking jobs and a better life. In all, nearly 8 million people living in America were born in Mexico. The latest Census data show that America’s Hispanic population, a majority of them Mexicans, grew by nearly 60 percent in the last decade, and is expected to continue to grow in the years to come. A convergence of events, a new government in Mexico headed by Vicente Fox and the election in the United States of former Texas Governor George W. Bush, is prompting new thinking on U.S.-Mexico relations and on immigration in particular.

Consideration is being given to a guest worker program, similar to the one the European Union has. President Fox would like to see even more. He wants some form of amnesty for Mexicans illegally in the United States, and someday, a truly open border. He has even created a cabinet post to deal specifically with Mexicans abroad, but concerns about Mexican immigration linger. Some argue that Mexicans are not assimilating in the same way as previous immigrant groups. Proportionately, fewer Mexican immigrants become naturalized U.S. citizens than immigrants from other countries. Others aren’t buying that line of argument. The City of Los Angeles has more Mexican residents than any city in the world except for Mexico City. Mayor Richard Riordan thinks assimilation is working.

MAYOR RIORDAN: I think the youngest generation of Latinos is being absorbed into the society. You go to the schools, the kindergartners, second, third graders, they’re not doing bilingual education, they’re learning English, and they’re assimilating.

MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, welcome to Think Tank. This is a moment of rare confluence and convergence in American-Mexican relations. We have a new president in Mexico, the first opposition party president in 70 years. You have a very pro-Mexican new American president from Texas, which used to be part of Mexico in an earlier moment in history. You have an oil situation suddenly front and center. So, it’s a great time to be talking about this.

Let me just go right around the room, starting with you, Peter, just get a brief take on what is going on.

Show Topic: ABORTION AGING AGRICULTURE ART BOSINA BUSINESS CANADA MR. SKERRY: Well, I think you’re right, Ben, this is a dramatic and fascinating time in U.S.-Mexican relations. Clearly, George Bush has a partner who wants to dance. But, in the areas that ?? certainly two of the areas you mentioned, culture and migration, it’s not clear to me that George Bush knows what tune he wants to dance to. I think Vincente Fox has a much clearer vision of what he wants from this relationship in those two areas, at least. But, I’m not at all convinced that Bush does.

MR. WATTENBERG: Mark?

MR. KRIKORIAN: My impression, I think, is similar to Peter’s in that a lot of the discussion about the relationship between the United States and Mexico is based on the premise that we have a confluence of interests, that our interests overlap, and are the same. And it seems to me that may well be true in, for instance, the area of trade, whereas it may actually very untrue in the area of immigration where our interests are in some ways almost directly contrary. So what’s important it seems to me is to understand what our interests are before we engage in a discussion with Mexico about these issues.

MR. WATTENBERG: Jorge, will you set these guys straight?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: Well, I think that the statement about immigration is perhaps a little bit too strong, if you take a look at what Senator Gramm went to Mexico to speak about immigration.

MR. WATTENBERG: This is Phil Gramm not Bob Graham, because both Gramms are playing right now.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: I’m sorry, yes. And he went to Mexico City. He spoke to the leaders of Mexico, and in an area where he was in agreement with a lot of people in Mexico, and I think that what we have in common has been already stated officially by the three North American countries, Canada, United States and Mexico. We have an agreement. And in that respect, of course, that’s an official statement.

MR. WATTENBERG: NAFTA.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: NAFTA, yes. So in that respect, we have an official statement from the three countries on the parts that we agree. Certainly, one new thing is that we have agreed to disagree in certain areas. And that is something that adds to the dynamism of the dialogue between the two countries.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. I just want to make one statement and then let me come back to what Mark was saying about immigration. You say that it may not be in our best interest, certain things, what is in the best interest of the United States, what is at the root of our geopolitical power and influence, are four physical factors, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Canadian border, and the Mexican border. We are blessed geo-politically in my judgment.

And so I would make the case, because I think Jorge and I are pretty much on the same side in this, which is that whatever is best for all of us is best for the United States also. Now, you tell me the problem that you have with immigration.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Let’s look at Mexican immigration. Mexico accounts for close to 30 percent of all the immigrants in the United States. In other words, there’s a significant amount of concentration of ethnic concentration of Mexican immigrants, a larger proportion than any other country in the past.

MR. WATTENBERG: Seventy percent of American immigration is non-Mexican.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes, that’s right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Just for the record, I mean, as another way of phrasing that.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Three-quarters of Mexican immigrants live in the four border states right next to Mexico. Immigrants have very high rates, among the highest rates of poverty, of lack of insurance, of failure to complete high school, have among the lowest rates of citizenship, of self-employment, such that Mexican immigration creates problems for our economy and for our society, for our fiscal policy and other areas that are different from much of other immigration.

MR. WATTENBERG: You’ve got something to say, and we’ve got to deal with these people. Go ahead.

MR. SKERRY: Well, I think there’s a different issue at stake here with regard to the poverty of Mexican immigrants. My reading of the evidence is that over time much of this poverty is alleviated, that there’s reason to be hopeful of movement.

MR. WATTENBERG: Second and third generation, just as with earlier immigrant groups.

MR. SKERRY: Yes, but that doesn’t solve the whole problem, first of all. Okay. Because first of all, how poverty gets defined, how the problems of Mexican immigrants get defined today I think is extremely problematic. We have a political path laid down for Mexican immigrants, and for all immigrants, but especially Mexican immigrants, that’s essentially what I call a post-civil rights model of politics. It’s essentially to imitate the path laid down by the black civil rights movement, to claim racial discrimination and racial disadvantage. That’s how these problems get defined today, they don’t get defined in terms of immigrant poverty, they get defined in terms of racism.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you think that’s how Mexican Americans are organizing themselves?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: No, I don’t think so. Of course, I recognize the definition of the problem of concentration of an ethnic group. But, that is not something that was done by nature. It was done to respond to American interests. California is a state where agriculture production of California corresponds to one-third of the total agricultural production of the United States. And that one-third is produced with a labor force that is 85 percent Mexican, 66 percent undocumented.

MR. WATTENBERG: President Fox is in favor, he sort of dilute it a little bit, but he’s in favor of open borders, basically free immigration between Mexico and the United States.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: Yes, the premise is, if we are capable of signing an agreement about free exchange of products, let’s have an agreement to free exchange of all the factors of production.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes, but it doesn’t work that way.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, but one of the reasons that American has gone into the free exchange of products is in part to prevent the free exchange of labor. If you can bring in the products made by cheap labor you don’t have to bring in the cheap laborers.

CHILE CHINA CONSERVATISM CRIME CUBA CULTURE DEFENSE DEMOGRAPHICS ECONOMICS EDUCATION EGYPT ELECTIONS ENGLAND ENVIRONMENT ETHICS FAMILY FEDERALISM FOREIGN POLICY FORESTS GOVERNING GOVERNMENT GUN CONTROL HAITI HISTORY IDEAS IDEOLOGY IMMIGRATION IRAQ ISRAEL JAPAN JOURNA MR. KRIKORIAN: The problem has been that this conflation of trade with immigration has at its base the assumption that people are just factors of production. The fact is, people are in part, factors of production, but they are much more. When you import a television you import that labor of the people who made that on a one-time basis. When you import a worker, you import him with all of his preferences and his vices, and his virtues. We import him as a human being. The Germans said, when their guest worker program failed, and one observer said, we asked Turkey to send us workers, but instead they sent us men. And that’s the fundamental ??

MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, but let me tell you something.

MR. KRIKORIAN: It’s even more than that.

MR. WATTENBERG: I’ve been traveling around here in Southern California for these last few days, and I’ve been here many times before. You have enormous concentrations here of Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Iranians, Russian Jews, Hummong (sp). You can just go on and on and on. And if you are living under the delusion that Mexican Americans are going to sweep the board here, I think that’s the funny farm.

MR. SKERRY: But, none of those groups, Ben, that you just listed subscribe to the kind of racial politics that I’m talking about.

MR. WATTENBERG: They all do.

MR. SKERRY: No, they don’t. I’m sorry. Those other immigrant groups conform to the classic immigrant pattern that your Jewish predecessors, and my Irish predecessors demonstrated. Mexican immigrants have a different pattern, seemingly. They define their problems and the burdens that they face in racial terms. They demand affirmative action and the voting rights act. Asians don’t demand that, Iranians don’t demand that.

MR. WATTENBERG: You’re telling me that some poor Mexican woman working as a chambermaid in an American hotel, when you can’t find Americans to do that job, that in her secret life she is organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?

MR. SKERRY: No, what I’m telling you is that her political interests, which are real, and those especially of her children, you like to focus on the next generation, let’s focus on the next generation, not on the cleaning woman, okay.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay.

MR. SKERRY: Her political interests and those of her children are defined by a leadership that sees the world differently than other immigrant leaderships have seen it. And I’m not sure I blame them. They face a different reality.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, you have great skepticism of that leadership. You think at root, and I think you’re right, that they are a lot of those so-called grassroots leaders are funded by foundations in New York, and have very little grassroots support here?

MR. SKERRY: I think that’s putting it much too simply. There’s a political vacuum here. However it’s funded, however it’s supported, they define the political reality. Assimilation is an extremely complicated process that produces all sorts of positive, and all sorts of negative outcomes. One of the negative outcomes is that you wind up having lots of Mexican origin individuals, or Hispanic origin individuals feel like they have lost track of their heritage. They feel like they’ve been blanched out into this amorphous America. And that’s an old story. Assimilation often produces those discontents. You know, it’s Marcus Lee Hanson who said ??

MR. WATTENBERG: Therefore, what?

MR. SKERRY: Therefore, you’re going to have lots of discontents.

MR. WATTENBERG: What else is new?

MR. SKERRY: What’s new is that you’re admitting that there’s going to be discontents, because I haven’t heard that in the Ben Wattenberg tune before.

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean the early part of the 20th Century, discontent about immigration and race in America was 10 times what it is now. You had people going around, professors who called themselves scientific racists. I mean, this is pussycat stuff.

MR. SKERRY: What’s different now is that, we have the continued prospect of continued immigration from Mexico, so that while all this assimilation is going on all these new folks are coming in with all the travail and problems that immigrants always have, but maybe even especially Mexican immigrants today. And, one more point, the political system that we have in place encourages the discontents of the un-assimilated and the discontents of the assimilated to converge in a demand of a racial group that we are being discriminated against racially, and we therefore require the controversial remedies that you’ve afforded African Americans.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me talk to Jorge for a minute. You have served on a task force whose fruits have been used by President Fox, in terms of immigration and in terms of the economy. So you have a certain relationship there. He said, as I understand it, at one point that if elected he would represent 120 million Mexicans, and there only happen to be 100 million Mexicans living in Mexico. Now getting to the idea of interfering with American internal affairs, is he not going, in a very charming way I must say, but isn’t he going over the line and saying, by the way, I’m the President of Mexico, I represent 20 million citizens in the United States, also? Isn’t that going to get him in a lot of trouble once the word gets out on that?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: I think that he probably will clarify that, but my own interpretation on that, having taught in the University of Texas at Austin and many other places, about the subject of Mexican Americans, I think that what he meant is Mexican Americans are explicitly interested in Mexican affairs, and Fox is welcoming that kind of an interest. And he’s saying, my government is going to address the aspirations of those of Mexican origin who live in the United States. And he did it so explicitly that he created a Cabinet position to deal with Mexicans abroad.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. I will predict that’s going to get in him trouble in the United States, for the record. I’m not saying he’s right. I’m not saying he’s wrong. That’s a tough one, in my judgment.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: I agree with that, it’s a tough one, yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: I want to just bring up one other thing, then we have to wrap up on the immigration. The Mexican total fertility rate, the number of children born per woman over the course of a lifetime has gone from almost 7 children per woman 40 years ago to about 2 children per woman today. Question, isn’t that a natural break on the argument that I have heard from you guys, which I interpret as the tan tide argument?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Nothing suggests that there is a short or even medium term connection between falling fertility and falling immigration. Modernization and urbanization in Mexico causes fertility to drop, you’re right. And that’s good, and in the long term, when we’re all dead, it will make a difference. But, it also causes large scale emigration pressures, as people leave the land, as land tenure systems are modernized, and people move to the cities, and they choose because of the migration networks that exist, many choose to move instead of Monterey or Guadalajara to Los Angeles and to Houston. So, in fact, the modernization of Mexico will over the next several generations cause increased emigration pressures, not decrease pressures.

MR. WATTENBERG: You’re half right. But, the idea of saying that this is several generations and when we’re all dead, this is in motion. When you have below replacement fertility, or just replacement fertility at the same time that you have immigration, if you let those two trends run you end up with zero Mexicans, you end up with a depopulating Mexico. Excuse me. There is not going to be enough, call it feedstock, for that scenario to play out with low fertility in America.

MR. KRIKORIAN: In the long run you’re right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Over the course of the next 10, 20, 30 years.

MR. KRIKORIAN: But, the demographic momentum already exists. So declining fertility among a larger number of women still produces a large number of people.

MR. WATTENBERG: What I’m saying is just with the Eastern European immigration, just with the Irish immigration, just with other immigrations they come and they go, they don’t go on forever, they’re not straight line projections.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Could I just make one quick point, Peter. Russia is a great example. Russia’s fertility has collapsed. Russia is on the road to total disappearance, which is not going to happen, because things will change. But, immigration from Russia has dramatically increased.

MR. WATTENBERG: I want to move on, because the other point that President Fox makes, and that President Bush makes is that now more than ever with a free market government in Mexico, with good economic growth rates about 5 percent for the last five years, about 4-1/2, 5 percent, that it is for all of the reasons we’ve all been talking about, it is very much in the best interest of the United States to boost economic growth in Mexico. Do you buy that?

MR. KRIKORIAN: The real immigration legislation that’s being considered in Congress now, the guest worker program is, in fact, directly contrary, in my view, to the objective you’re pointing to. We have increased free trade from Mexico for a lot of goods. But, a lot of agricultural goods, because of the political heft of farmers in the United States, are still blocked.

MR. WATTENBERG: Describe the guest worker program, first explain it to us, then comment on it.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: The guest worker program alludes to the similar notion in Europe 25 years ago. And to the Brazil program 20 or 30 years ago. And that’s something that is not a homogenous position in the United States.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, the actual program means that you let in foreigners, in this case, Mexicans, for a finite amount of time legally, they don’t have to come in illegally to pick a crop, and then they go back? That’s what we’re talking about?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: Yes, that’s what I’ve heard from the notion that was made public by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas when he went to Mexico about three weeks ago.

MR. WATTENBERG: And you favor it?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: No.

MR. WATTENBERG: You do not favor it?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: No, I favor amnesty.

MR. WATTENBERG: Are they mutually contradictory?

MR. BUSTAMENTE: No, I don’t think so. Amnesty has to do with those that are already in the United States, and that would become legal. And by becoming legal, they would have rights, they would have ways to defend themselves, depend less on government.

MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, we are more or less out of time, but there is one other topic I want to return to, which is the culture. In my judgment, culture beats everything, sooner or later. And you now have a situation; here we are in Southern California, but across America but particularly in this area, of a blended population. You go down to Monterey and they’re tuning in on their dishes and following the Dallas Cowboys. And it goes both ways, we have this huge Latin culture rippling across America, Ricky Martin, and lots more. And this is not new, it is intensified that we are creating a first universal nation. What is happening now is simply more of the same and basically healthy. Comments, please.

LISM JUSTICE KOREA LABOR LAND USE LIBERALISM MEDIA MEDICINE MIDDLE EAST MUSIC POLITICS MR. SKERRY: A couple of things, first of all, if this process of fusion of what sometimes they call ethno-genesis, the creation of a new people out of various strands is healthy, which I think it is, immigration slows that process, it puts obstacles in it, it creates new ?? it sort of sets back the process.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, it could never happen without immigration. I mean, that’s the root cause of it.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, but we were ethnically variegated even 250 years ago, and the process is ?- I mean, to me the answer is we need more sort of fusion and melding, rather than less, and immigration is an obstacle to that.

MR. SKERRY: I don’t deny that assimilation is ongoing and extremely rapid, but it isn’t necessarily the solution to all our problems. But, I don’t think you’re recognizing the fact that the immigration regime that we have now generates profound discontents among the immigrants themselves, as well as non-immigrants. And you just can’t wish that away by pointing to 100 years ago. We’re in a different situation now. It’s not all the same.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: One of the differences in the situation ??

MR. WATTENBERG: This is the last comment, so you’ve got it.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: ?? is that we have to distinguish between, in the question of assimilation, between cultural diversity and the forces against homogeneity, cultural homogeneity. And I think that what you see is that the struggle for equality among Mexican Americans, Latinos, et cetera, is one that has to be understood in terms ?? in the context of all the struggles in favor of equality in the world and I don’t think that you could say that viewing the history of the struggles for equality that that’s something that has had a bad ending. I think that in terms of the human experience it’s very much the opposite and in that respect I think that there’s an enrichment.

MR. WATTENBERG: Will you accept one minor amendment that it’s a struggle for the equality of opportunity.

MR. BUSTAMENTE: Yes, definitely.

MR. WATTENBERG: That’s what we’re talking about.

We are out of time. Thank you very much, Jorge Bustamente, Mark Krikorian, and Peter Skerry and thank you. Please send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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