Toward a Stronger U.S.–Mexico Relationship By Reihan Salam
One of my pet causes is promoting a stronger, more constructive partnership with Mexico, and the Central American migrant caravans offer a perfect illustration of why it’s so important. Mexican president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador is an avowed leftist, and it is natural that U.S. conservatives would be wary of him. But his desire to improve life for ordinary Mexicans is very much aligned with the U.S. interest in reducing unauthorized immigration, as is his stated commitment to creating opportunities for Central American migrants in Mexico. That is why I strongly believe the Trump administration ought to work closely with the incoming López Obrador government. By discouraging non-meritorious asylum claims, which have surged in recent years, the “Remain in Mexico” plan that is currently being discussed by U.S. and Mexican officials would greatly alleviate the current migration crisis.
The problem, however, is that while Remain in Mexico would clearly redound to the benefit of the U.S., it is essential that Mexicans feel as though they’re benefiting as well. And that is why I’d love to see President Trump offer something tangible to López Obrador that could cement a long-term deal.
What is it that that López Obrador’s government might want from the U.S.? For now, let’s leave aside practical considerations, such as, ahem, finding a proposal that Democrats in the House would be willing to pass and President Trump would be willing to sign. Because, well, we’re in the ideas business, people — and because political realities can change unexpectedly, so it never hurts to think big.
Elsewhere, I’ve argued that we ought to allow U.S. retirees to make use of their Medicare benefits in Mexico. Doing so could both reduce the cost to U.S. taxpayers of caring for older Americans who’d benefit from a lower cost of living, including lower-cost medical and custodial care, and generate low- and mid-skill employment in Mexico by fueling the growth of a labor-intensive eldercare sector. (Unbeknownst to me, Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished historian and Wall Street Journal foreign-affairs columnist, made this case in testimony before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Economic Policy last year.) This could prove a huge boon to Mexico and, as such, it would be a powerful inducement to cooperate with U.S. immigration-enforcement efforts.
Not pie-in-the-sky enough for you? Consider the fact that Mexican nationals represent just over half of all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Needless to say, their fate is of great interest to the Mexican government. According to the Pew Research Center, the unauthorized-immigrant population has been drifting down, mostly because the influx of clandestine Mexican border-crossers and visa overstayers has greatly decreased and at least some unauthorized Mexican immigrants have left the U.S. One lesson of the decrease in the size of the Mexican unauthorized-immigrant population is that “self-deportation” really does happen in practice.
The challenge now, however, is that a large majority of unauthorized immigrant adults who remain in the U.S. have resided in the country for 10 years or more, and Pew estimates that 43 percent of them live in households with U.S.-born children. Simply put, long-resident unauthorized immigrants with U.S.-born children and, in some cases, U.S.-born spouses are utterly unlike recent violators. If nothing else, long-resident unauthorized immigrants in mixed-status households are far more sympathetic than recent violators, and efforts to remove them have proven politically perilous. Though it is easy to see why immigration advocates focus on the DACA-eligible population and other unauthorized immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors, the larger challenge facing restrictionists is the question of how to deal with people who’ve established deep ties in U.S., not just the Dreamers.
There is plenty of room to debate the wisdom of an amnesty. Recently, Robert VerBruggen laid out the deep disagreements that have prevented a so-called grand bargain from being struck. I’ve laid out my case for why we ought to pair an amnesty with enforcement and the adoption of a skills-based system, but I appreciate that this is a contentious question and that there’s plenty of room for disagreement. One possibility I’ve neglected in the past, however, is that some kind of “path to legal status” might elicit goodwill from the Mexican government, which could do a great deal to help the U.S. regulate migration flows. This certainly won’t convince those who are firmly opposed to an amnesty, but it’s worth keeping the potential impact on the U.S.–Mexico relationship in mind.
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