VIII

EPILOGUE: U.S.MEXICAN RELATIONS IN THE

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
You cannot imagine what a sensation it caused in Mexico when the president of the United
States chose our family ranch in Guanajuato for his first foreign state visit. Mexican
president Vicente Fox (200006) chose those words to open the description of his
presidency in his memoirs, Revolution of Hope. Only once every twelve years, Mexico and
the United States inaugurate presidents within seven weeks of each otherFox on
December 1, 2000, and George W. Bush (200109) on January 20, 2001. Fox and Bush had
met and become quite friendly as governors of Guanajuato and Texas, respectively. Fox
was touched by Bushs gesturethe reason I will always be his friend, no matter how
sharply we may disagree on Iraq.
At this meeting on February 16, 2001, Fox and Bush pledged to work together to address
the questions of Mexican migration to the United States, a topic that would play a dominant
role for the duration of their presidencies. More importantly, the presidents believed that the
sun had just risen over a new, better relationship between the United States and Mexico and
that they were the key actors at the dawn of a bright new future. Yet, coinciding with this
bilateral summit, President Bush ordered an air strike on Iraq, and it was the bombing of
Iraq that riveted the journalists who asked questions at the joint press conference. That
foundational moment, which combined hugs and war, would shape and shake U.S.
Mexican relations for the balance of their presidencies.1
In this epilogue, we make four arguments to explain the pattern of U.S. Mexican relations
during the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, we argue that there were three
changes in the structure of the international system. The U.S. government came to look at
the world through the prism of the security concerns of terrorism, securitizing its policies
with regard to the movement of goods and people and the management of border issues.
The U.S. government thus narrowed its international agenda. The U.S. government also
over-stretched its power and over-burdened the goodwill of others; a general response to
the U.S. governments choice to go to war in Iraq was an endeavor to balance and contain
U.S. power, which Mexico joined briefly and to a limited extent. A longer-term change in
the structure of the international system was the rise of Chinas
economic power and its implications for other countries. The effects from these three
international systemic changes upon U.S.Mexican relations were the securitization of
hitherto non-security bilateral issues, greater strains in relations between the two
governments, and more anger over some adverse impacts of international trade, which were
blamed on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), not just on China.
Second, we argue that these changes in the international systems structure were
differentially mediated through the bilateral institutions that were created in the 1990s. The
bilateral economic institutions embodied in NAFTA performed well, rendering trade and
investment disputes routine technical issues that rarely required presidential attention. The
1

embryonic bilateral security institutions to foster cooperation to address international

migration and counter criminal drug traffic atrophied, however. There was no bilateral
institutional architecture to cope with the new U.S. security demons.
Third, we argue that transnational processes set the agenda for bilateral relations. Bilateral
trade and investment boomed, enabling the Mexican economy, for the first time since the
early 1960s, to make it through a U.S. economic recession without a financial panic. These
good results under NAFTA contained the economic disputes that might have otherwise
spun out of control. Illegal drug production and especially drug traffic continued to increase
in response to persistently high U.S. demand for such substances and the relative absence of
effective U.S. demand-reduction and prisoner rehabilitation programs. Undocumented
migration continued; overcome by security fears, the United States reduced the number of
authorized lawful Mexican immigrants, inducing even more to choose illegal migration.
Absent effective bilateral institutions to address migration and criminal drug activities, both
governments spent considerable time, diplomatic effort, and political capital focusing on
these topics, with little good to show in the end. At the end of the Fox and Bush
presidencies, these two problems were as intractable as or worse than they were on their
respective inauguration days.
Fourth, to our surprise, the domestic political context had only a modest impact on the
conduct of bilateral relations. Public opinion turned somewhat adverse in both countries but
in neither with sufficient force to prevent cooperation. Mexicos democratization led to a
more independent Congress and Supreme Court and a more contentious Congress. But the
Court remained supportive of presidential foreign policy and the Congress concurred with
the presidency over the disposition of nearly every treaty. The main impact on bilateral
relations stemmed not from Mexicos democratization but from changes in the United
States. The U.S. Supreme Court made the management of U.S.Mexican relations more
complex and the newly created U.S. Department of Homeland Security made bilateral
cooperation more difficult.
In this chapter, we examine these issues in U.S.Mexican relations between 2000 and 2008.
We organize the presentation approximately in the same way as in
the books original edition, emphasizing new trends whenever pertinent. We pay special
attention to the differences between the 1990s and the 2000s, in particular the greater
impact of security issues in the bilateral relations and the higher priority that the Mexican
government accorded to migration issues in its foreign policy design. We examine
selectively four changes in the domestic context that made the management of bilateral
relations marginally more complex: the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security, the behavior of Congress as well as the behavior of the Supreme Court in both
countries, and the changes in public opinion. The great successes of the 1990sending
Mexicos international debt and financial crises, designing effective Mexican fiscal and
monetary policies, and establishing a secure framework for the flow of trade and
investment under NAFTAhelped the two governments to focus more on the exigencies
that security emergencies imposed on them and to address the unaddressed legacy of the
previous century regarding the movement of peoples in North America.
2

THE CHANGES IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: EFFECTS ON THE

BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP

The international system changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The
magnitude of three systemic changes during this decade was less dramatic than those that
occurred around 1990 but they were significant nevertheless.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked several aircraft, crashed two of them on the
World Trade Center towers in New York, one on the U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon
headquarters outside Washington, D.C., while a fourth went down over fields in
Pennsylvania, killing over 3,000 people altogether. The United States received impressive
worldwide condolences and support. In response to the terrorist attacks, the United States
went to war in Afghanistan to depose that countrys Taliban government, which had hosted
the terrorist organization that sponsored these attacks. The United States retained
significant worldwide support for its decision to go to war in Afghanistan, including from
its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Those terrorist attacks compelled the U.S. government to refocus its international priorities
on the problem of international terrorism. Many U.S. policies toward countries near
including Mexicoand far were subordinated to the war on terror. President Bush had
less time and interest to attend to policies on economic issues or international migration, for
example. This change in U.S. priorities, often called securitization, was the first significant
change in the international system in the twenty-first century.
For the duration of the Bush administration, however, no terrorist based in Mexico crossed
into the United States. Yet, U.S.Mexican relations would be deeply affected by the new
U.S. government prism on the world. As on other issues fundamental to U.S. security (see
Chapters II and III), Mexico had to
accommodate the new U.S. priorities to conduct its bilateral relations with the United
States, as we explain later.
The second change in the international system unfolded over several years. In Chapter II,
we take issue with Kenneth Waltzs forecast regarding the years following the end of the
Cold War in Europe. In the early 1990s, Waltz argued that the response of other countries
to one among them seeking or gaining preponderant power is to try to balance against it. 2
Consistent with Waltz, we concur that Mexico before World War II had sought to balance
against the United States but also argue that Mexicos hybrid foreign policy after 1940 was
more nuanced; Mexico abandoned a balancing strategy in the 1990s. Waltz wrote not about
U.S.Mexican relations but about the international system generally; his general systemic
forecast for the 1990s was also inaccurate.
The sharpest alternative to Waltzs forecast dated from late 1990 when essayist Charles
Krauthammer described the post-Cold War international system as unipolar, that is, The
center of world power is an unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its
Western allies. On the eve of the U.S. decision to go to war against Iraq, Krauthammer
revised his earlier argument. In the winter of 200203, he averred, The unipolar moment
3

has become the unipolar era. The challenge to such unipolarity is not from the outside,
contrary to Waltzs analysis, but from the inside, by which he meant whether the United
States would be governed by those willing to engage in the aggressive and confident
application of unipolar power. He closed his article by paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin:
History has given you an empire, if you will keep it.3
In March 2003, the United States went to war in Iraq. The Bush administration believed
that the government of Iraqs President Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass
destruction, conspired to support the terrorists who attacked on September 11, 2001,
committed brutal crimes against its own people, threatened its smaller neighbors, and ruled
Iraq in authoritarian fashion. The United States Senate supported the Bush administrations
decision to go to war.
In due course, however, this U.S. decision would redeem Waltzs forecast about the
international system. The United States did not obtain United Nations (U.N.) Security
Council authorization for the war in Iraq, despite strong efforts to do so. Nevertheless, the
United States went to war with the backing of countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy,
Spain, and Japan, but over the opposition of others including Germany, France, Russia,
Chile, Mexico, and Canada. By mid-2003, it had become clear that Iraq did not have
weapons of mass destruction, nor had Iraq conspired to support the terrorists who attacked
New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Support for the Bush administrations
war policy in Iraq weakened among its allies and within the United States. The unipolar
era had ended.
The willingness of other powers to oppose the United States had grown. The Bush
administration found it increasingly difficult to obtain support for its
policies regarding a new international trade agreement under the rubric of the World Trade
Organization (WTO), its preferred policies with regard to climate change, efforts to address
international energy issues as prices rose dramatically throughout the first eight years of the
decade, or its endeavors to isolate the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe. The
Bush administration had to accommodate the preferences of others regarding North Korea.
Mexico balanced against the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq and would in the years
following remain strongly opposed to U.S. Iraq war policy. As a member of the United
Nations Security Council, it signaled its opposition to any authorization for the U.S.-led
coalition to go to war in Iraq (in the end, there was no formal Security Council vote because
the United States and its allies withdrew the resolution). Since the start of the U.S.
Mexican rapprochement begun in response to World War II, this was an unprecedented
Mexican government decision. As noted in Chapter IV, Mexico had long avoided U.N.
Security Council membership in order to avoid confrontations with the United States on
matters remote from Mexicos fundamental interests; the repeated U.S.Mexican
disagreements during Mexicos last membership on the Security Council (198081) had
confirmed the decision not to stand for Security Council election. President Fox and
Foreign Relations Secretary Jorge Castaeda wanted Mexico to rejoin the Security Council,
however, and it happened in time for this new dispute between the United States and
Mexico. Moreover, Mexico had not supported the U.S. war in Vietnam or other bellicose
4

U.S. actions but never throughout those decades had a government of Mexico opposed the
United States on a question as fundamental as the U.S. government decision to go to war in
Iraq where Mexicos decisionwar authorization in the U.N. Security Councilwas
materially significant.
The third international systemic change was the rise of China in world markets. Between
1990 and 2000, on the eve of Chinas accession to the WTO, Chinas exports to the world
had increased from $62.7 billion to $249.2 billion. In the short span of the Bush
administrations first term, upon Chinas accession to the WTO in 2001, Chinas exports to
the world jumped to $593.4 billion by the end of 2004. Chinas imports from the world
followed a similar trajectory.4
At first, the rise of Chinese exports to the United States did not adversely affect Mexican
exports to the United States. For example, Credit Suisse First Boston analyzed Mexican
competitiveness in the U.S. market between 1999 and 2001. It concluded, Mexican
exports to the US have fared relatively well Market share gains by Mexican exporters in
key US industries have taken place along with share gains by Chinese exportersat the
expense of market share losses by exporters from Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom,
among others.5
This soon changed. Between 2002 and 2005, Credit Suisse found that Mexico gained
market share in the United States only in 11 out of 138 product groups examined,
employing five-digit end-use U.S. trade classifications. Competition from other countries
cost Mexico $21 billion in foregone exports between 2003 and 2005. Mexican losses in
U.S. market share were most severe in cars and auto parts, computers and computer parts,
apparel and household goods, and telecommunications equipment. In most of the important
industry groups where Mexico lost market share, China was just one part of the problem.
Mexico lost market share to other countries as well. Moreover, the domestic problems of
the Mexican economynot just international competitionhindered Mexican
competitiveness, especially Mexican policies regarding the energy sector, the labor market,
and infrastructure.6
In aggregate terms, as Table 8.1 shows, U.S. imports from China rose from $100.1 billion
U.S. in 2000 to $321.5 billion in 2007. U.S. imports from Mexico in that same time period
increased from $135.9 billion to $210.8 billion. By 2003, China had replaced Mexico as the
second most important partner for U.S. imports; by 2007, China topped Canada to become
the worlds most important supplier of U.S. imports.
Mexico had been the last of the 141 members of the WTO to sign a bilateral agreement
with China to clear its admission to the WTO. Chinese competition turned out to be real.
By 2003, 85 percent of shoe manufacturers in Mexico had shifted their operations to China.
Sony, NEC, VTech, and Kodak closed their Mexican operations and moved them to China.
Twelve of Mexicos twenty most important economic sectors that export to the United
States face some or substantial competition from Chinese exporters.7 In the first four years
of this decade, Mexico lost some 250,000 jobs in the maquiladora or export-processing
sector because firms switched production to China.8
5

China does not buy petroleum or other natural resources from Mexico. Thus, Sino-Mexican
trade most resembles trade between industrial countries. China exports to Mexico
electromechanical equipment, household appliances, textiles, and chemical products,
among others. Mexico exports to China synthetic fibers, steel products, plastics, beer, and
so forth. As a World Bank study puts it, Mexico is the only country in Latin America and
the Caribbean whose comparative
TABLE 8.1 U.S. Top Trade Partners: Exports, Imports, and Trade Balance, 200007
(billion U.S. dollars)
Country

U.S. Exports

U.S. Imports

U.S. Trade Balance

2000

2003

2007

2000

2003

2007

2000

2003

2007

Canada

176.4

169.5

248.4

229.2

224.2

313.1

-52.8

-54.7

-64.7

Mexico

111.7

97.5

136.5

135.9

138.1

210.8

-24.2

-40.6

-74.3

China

16.3

28.4

65.2

100.1

152.4

321.5

-83.8

-124.0

-256.3

Japan

65.3

52.1

62.7

146.6

118.0

145.5

-81.3

-60.9

-82.8

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Trade and Industry Information,

http://tse.export.gov accessed July 14, 2008.
advantage has been moving in the same direction as the comparative advantage of India
and China.9
Chinas continued rise shifted relations in the international system and compelled the U.S.
government to focus attention away from its North American and toward its Asian partners
regarding economic matters. U.S.Mexican trade continued to increase during the centurys
first decade, howeverChinas rise implied no net loss to Mexico.
Notwithstanding these three international systemic changes, Mexicos grand strategy in
foreign policy remained on the same course set in 1990: bandwagon with the United States.
That was the theme of the BushFox meeting in Guanajuato in February 2001 and, despite
U.S.Mexican differences over the U.S. choice to go to war in Iraq, it remained Mexicos
fundamental approach to the United States for the presidencies of Vicente Fox and Felipe
Caldern (200612). Mexico sought closer collaboration with the United States over
international migration, combating criminals, dispute resolution over trade issues, the
defense of human rights in various countries, and the advancement of market-oriented
democratic polities. Mexico had come to embrace the idea of its home in North America
alongside the United States. But, now that exogenous international systemic changes were
under way, coping with the United States was a greater challenge.

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

International security issues remained a contentious arena in U.S.Mexican relations whose

management became more difficult because of the atrophy of the embryonic bilateral
security institutions that had been created in the 1990s. The principal difference between
the bandwagoning foreign policies of the Fox and Caldern administrations was their
respective approaches to security policy implementation: The Fox administration was likely
to react to U.S. security initiatives whereas the Caldern administration took security policy
initiatives on its own. First, consider the problems.
The Fox administrations response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, was
baffling. The initial expressions of horror at the terrorist attacks were soon overcome by an
unseemly public debate on whether Mexico would be drawn into the U.S. war on terrorism
and whether Mexico would submit to the United States. Some Mexican politicians and
mass media took the opportunity to criticize Foreign Relations Secretary Jorge Castaedas
instant and unequivocal expression of solidarity with New Yorkers, amidst whom he had
lived and worked at various times. As it turned out, Castaeda had added to the bilateral
U.S.Mexican complexity because he had persuaded President Foxduring Foxs
triumphant state visit to Washington on the very eve of the September 11, 2001, attacksto
give formal notice that Mexico would pull out of the Inter-American Treaty for Reciprocal
Assistance (Rio Treaty, signed in 1947).
Yet the oddest aspect of the official Mexican response was Foxs behavior. Here was a
president who had worked for Coca Cola, spoke fluent English, and had made the
improvement of U.S.Mexican relations the main pillar of his foreign policy and a key
element for the construction of a new Mexico. Fox had cultivated a personal friendship
with his boot-wearing cowboy buddy, George W. Bush, as the symbol of, and the
instrument for, new relations between Mexico and the United States. Fox, alas, allowed his
Cabinet members to squabble in public. It took Fox two weeks to order his Cabinet
ministers to shut up to enable him to repair the damage to U.S.Mexican relations.10
In contrast, British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to New York. Brazil invoked the InterAmerican Treaty for Reciprocal Assistancethe very Treaty from which Mexico had just
announced it would withdrawon the grounds that a country of the Americas had been
subject to international attack: an attack on one was an attack on all. Blair and Brazilian
leaders understood that the United States, above all, needed a hug.
Speaking in Tijuana on October 3, 2001, President Fox began to repair the damage to
Mexicos relations with the United States: We consider that the fight against terrorism is
part of Mexicos commitment with Canada and the United States to create a shared space of
development, well-being, and integral security within the framework of the North American
Free Trade Agreement. The Mexican government assumes the fight against terrorists as an
international mandate, which is incumbent on those countries that have signed the many
juridical instruments of the United Nations, as Mexico had.11
It would not prove easy. The United States soon went to war in Afghanistan and prepared
for the same in Iraq. President Fox personally opposed the U.S. war policy in Iraq. As the
7

start of the war in Iraq neared, Fox spent much of his time in Mexico campaigning in
opposition to the war; in so doing, he mobilized Mexican opinion in such a way that he left
himself no political room to maneuver.12 Three factors shaped his decision. One was a
genuine opposition, based on his religious beliefs, to this war, which he perceived
correctly from the startto be a war of choice: there had been no prior Iraqi aggression.
The second was the strong convictionequally correctthat the United States had no
persuasive evidence regarding Iraqs possession of weapons of mass destruction. The
Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, Adolfo Aguilar, who represented Mexico on
the U.N. Security Council, strengthened Foxs resolve.
The third factor was Foxs belief, as he wrote in his memoirs, the United States didnt
really have much carrot, and no stick at all. The Bush administration would not pull out of
NAFTA or cut back on Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) security support because
interests were shared. Mexico had paid back all its loans to the U.S. Treasury and the
International Monetary Fund from its 199495 financial crisis and did not depend on much
U.S. assistance of any sort. In 2002 the Bush administration dropped its proposal to
Congress for guest worker
reforms. Thus, Fox concluded, Even if the Bush administration had wanted to punish us,
there was little they could do.13 In this last respect, Fox was not correct. He underestimated
the opportunity costs to U.S.Mexican relations. There would be no progress in U.S.
Mexican relations for the remainder of his presidencythe cost to Mexico of opposing the
United States.
In March 2003, however, the Mexican government did understand that it could not oppose
the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq and simultaneously fail to address the risk that U.S.
adversaries would use Mexico to attack the United States. Operationally, then, Mexico
behaved like a U.S. ally. Immediately following the start of the war, Mexico launched
Operation Sentinel to beef up security along its northern and southern borders and secure
airports, ports, oil platforms, and other key installations. Ten thousand soldiers were
deployed to the northern border, three thousand soldiers to the southern border, and roughly
another five thousand to provide protection at specific sites. This was a very significant
deployment, given the limited deployable logistical capacities of the Mexican armed forces
(total number of active military personnel was about 240,000). Mexico also intensified its
cooperation with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As Government
Secretary Santiago Creel put it: Mexico is not going to be used as a transit point for any
terrorist or anyone who wishes to harm the United States.14
Beyond terrorism and war, there were important security legacies in U.S. Mexican
relations. Drug traffic and its related violence still ranked high. These relations were also
affected by the aftershocks of the U.S. response to September 11 terrorism. In near term,
the U.S. government diverted assets from counter-narcotics programs that pertained to
Mexico. Three-quarters of U.S. Coast Guard counternarcotics assets in the Gulf of Mexico
and Pacific coast areas of North America were transferred to other missions, leaving the
Mexican navy, which had been carrying out missions jointly with the U.S. Coast Guard, to
work alone without U.S. intelligence. Similarly, the FBI diverted 60 agents from the
8

Mexican frontier. The Mexican government persevered, but it was also betrayed by corrupt
cops who cooperated with drug traffickers.15
The longer-term picture shows the negligible impact of September 11 on measurable
counternarcotics operations in Mexico. That is the good news. The less good news is that
the same evidence suggests that there is little relationship between policy efforts, on the one
hand, and achievements, on the other. Table 8.2 indicates that, at best, opium or cannabis
(marihuana) eradication efforts had no impact on the net cultivation of opium or cannabis
or the potential for opium gum, heroin, or cannabis production. Indeed, opium, heroin, and
cannabis cultivation and production likely increased during the Fox administrations six
years in office. The most clearly changed policy variable is that the number of Mexican
nationals arrested for these crimes jumped markedly in 2004 and remained at the higher
level, including the first year of the Caldern administration. Yet
TABLE 8.2 Opium, Heroin, Cannabis, and Cocaine in Mexico, 19982007
1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Opium
net 5500
cultivation
(HA)

3600

1900

4400

2700

4800

3500

3300

5100

n.a.

Opiume
radication
(HA)

17449 15469 15300 19115 19157 20034 15925 21609 16889 11046

Potential
60
opium
gum
(MT)

43

21

71

58

101

73

71

110

n.a.

Potential
heroin (MT)

12

13

n.a.

3700

3900

4100

7900

7500

5800

5600

8600

n.a.

Cannabis net 4600

cultivation
(HA)
Cannabis
eradication
(HA)

23928 33583 33000 28699 30775 36585 30851 30842 31161 21357

Cannabis net 8300

production
(MT)

6700

7000

7400

7900

13500 10440 10100 15500 n.a.

Cocaine HCL 22
seizures (MT)

33

18

30

12

21

27

30

21

48

Cannabis
1062
seizures (MT)

1459

1619

1839

1633

2248

2208

1786

1849

2174

Opium
150
seizures (KG)

800

270

516

210

198

464

275

75

292

Heroin
120
seizures (KG)

258

268

269

282

306

302

459

351

298

9784

6930

8822

18763 19076 11493 19120

Mexican
nationals
arrested

10034 10261 n.a.

Source: U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 2008, vol. I, 182,
http://www.state.gov accessed July 14, 2008.
Note: MT = metrictons; HA = hectares; KG = kilograms; n.a. = not available.
this change also failed to improve the measurable outcomes that matter, namely, cultivation
and production.
There were two political accomplishments. In September 2002, the U.S. Congress enacted
and President Bush signed the Foreign Relations Authorization for Fiscal Year (FY) 2003.
Section 706 of this Act formally suspended the previous U.S. drug certification and
sanctions procedures that had bedeviled U.S. relations with other countries, including
Mexico, in preceding years (see Chapter II). Instead, the president was required to issue an
annual report to spotlight countries that had failed demonstrably to take appropriate
counternarcotics measures. The Act lifted this dark cloud from U.S.Mexican relations at
last.16 For its part, in 2004 Mexico enacted its own National Security Law. It created a new
National Security Council and provided means to organize anti-crime efforts and gather
intelligence.
In 200506, levels of drug crime-related violence escalated across Mexico, especially on
the northern border with the United States, despite policy efforts. 17 Soon after his
inauguration in December 2006, President Felipe Caldern launched a major assault on
drug cartels and other violent organizations in Mexico. As Minister of Government
Francisco Ramrez Acua put it dramatically during a confrontational question-and-answer
exchange in the Chamber of Deputies: Organized crime was becoming the owner of the
nations territory drug traffickers controlled the State of Michoacn, they controlled the
State of Guerrero, they controlled the State of Tamaulipasand other states.18
President Calderns objective was plain: the state must exercise its monopoly of force. He
deployed 27,000 troops within 11 Mexican states to achieve this objective instead of
continuing to rely on law enforcement agencies. Caldern ordered Mexican security forces
to intensify their cooperation with their U.S. counterparts. Within the opening months of the
new administration, as a result of systematic investigations, 284 Federal Preventative Police
(Polica Federal Preventiva, PFP) and Federal Investigative Agency (Agencia Federal de
10

Investigaciones, AFI) were dismissed, including all 34 regional PFP coordinators;

thousands of other Mexican officials were also dismissed on the grounds of drug trafficrelated corruption.
The U.S. government responded eagerly. Cooperation with the Mexican navy increased.
U.S. agencies trained thousands of Mexican law enforcement agents in 2007, Calderns
first year in office. As the U.S. Department of State put it in its official report for 2007,
The Caldern Administrations courage, initiative and success have exceeded all
expectations, in particular celebrating its using the military to re-establish authority and
counter the cartels firepower.19
President Bush met with President Caldern in Mrida in March 2007. They agreed to
expand bilateral and regional counternarcotics and security cooperation. U.S. and Mexican
officials met behind closed doors over several months to craft Plan Mrida. On May 22,
2007, Mexicos full draft proposal called for the
exchange of intelligence and focused on U.S. support for training Mexicans. Mexico
insisted that no U.S. troops would enter Mexican territory, nor would U.S. civilian agents
participate in operations in Mexico. On October 22, 2007, the two governments issued their
first public joint statement, announcing the multiyear Plan Mrida to assist Mexico and
Central American countries to combat drug trafficking and other criminal organizations.20
The Bush administration asked Congress for $500 million for Mexico and $50 million for
Central American countries in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 supplemental and $450 million for
Mexico and $100 million for Central America in FY09. The goal was to transfer $1400
million to Mexico over three years. In June 2008, the Congress approved $400 million for
Mexico and other funds for Central America. The scale of the effort was significantly larger
than in the past. For example, U.S. aid to Mexico for these purposes had totaled just $65.4
million in FY07 and $50.6 million in FY08. Four-fifths of the new FY08 funds for Mexico
were for equipment and technology infrastructure improvements for Mexican military and
law enforcement agencies. The remaining one-fifth of the FY08 funds for Mexico would go
for institution building and law enforcement initiatives, including the office of the
prosecutor, the courts, the prisons, and other law enforcement civilian institutions; less than
10 percent of the FY09 request was for this last purpose.21
Critics of Plan Mrida argued that it principally provided more funds for the same strategy
that had long been in place. Missing from Plan Mrida was funding to reduce the U.S.
demand for drugs, improve access to high-quality treatment for drug addicts, programs to
better address the incubation of drug criminals in prison, closer supervision of druginvolved offenders on probation or parole, or prevention of weapons smuggling from the
United States to Mexico. Critics of Plan Mrida highlighted the very high profile for
military efforts instead of civilian law enforcement and insufficient attention to the
substantial risk of human rights violations from security forces whose training involved this
component insufficiently. The repeatedly unsuccessful strategy, which was now to be better
funded, had failed to prevent the drop in drug prices for consumers or dent the lucrative
business.22
11

To make problem-solving more difficult, the two governments had allowed the high-level
bilateral institutions created in the late 1990s to fall into disuse, in particular, the High
Level Contact Group to Control Drugs and the Binational Commission. The Fox and Bush
administrations found it difficult to fashion a broad cooperative framework over security
relations, in part because they disagreed over the Iraq war and the Mexican government
feared that the United States would ask Mexico to deploy troops abroad. Mexico had even
pulled out of the Inter-American Treaty for Reciprocal Assistance. How far this bilateral
institutional deterioration had unfolded became clear when U.S. defense secretary Robert
Gates visited Mexico City in April 2008. No U.S. defense secretary had
visited since 1996; Gates expressed his public surprise at the lack of such contact. Asked at
a press conference about military to military relations, the articulate Gates stumbled
verbally, searching for words, referring to the bilateral military relationship as not in its
infancy, but is young. He acknowledged the sensitivities here in Mexico as his
explanation for why the relationship is limited.23
Such sensitivities also identified two security issues in Mexico that would not involve the
United States. Fortunately for Mexico, the Zapatista insurgency (Ejrcito Zapatista de
Liberacin Nacional) in Chiapas did not lead to significant violent incidents in the 2000s;
Zapatismos impact was confined to the State of Chiapas and even less so to neighboring
southern states. The Mexican armys counterinsurgency work, facing the Zapatistas, began
badly in 1994 but, in the end, was successful and impressive.24
Less fortunate for Mexico was the reemergence of the EPR (Popular Revolutionary Army,
Ejrcito Popular Revolucionario). The EPR had been a small insurgent organization in
Guerrero and Oaxaca in 1996. It reemerged in 2007, carrying out violent attacks on the
infrastructure and installations of the Mexican state oil enterprise, PEMEX, at three sites in
two states in July and at six sites in two other states in September. Mexico would fight the
EPR on its own. U.S. defense secretary Gates confirmed that the United States would
defer to the Mexican government.25
The fear of international troop deployment paralyzed the Mexican government in other
contexts as well. In early 2004, the U.N. Security Council authorized a peacekeeping force
in Haiti to enable the United States to extricate its forces from Haiti, where they had been
deployed as part of a complex maneuver to depose Haitis constitutional president, JeanBertrand Aristide. The U.N. force, to be led by a Brazilian General, was constituted of
forces from many countries but principally from Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Mexico had
sent no peacekeepers to Haiti in 1994 and sent none in 2004, notwithstanding U.N. auspices
with Latin American partners in 2004.26
Thus Mexican bandwagoning strategy remained mindful of long-standing legacies in
Mexican foreign policy. Security cooperation would never become an invitation to the
United States to involve itself in Mexicos domestic security issues. And Mexico would for
the most part not deploy its troops abroadpolicies well understood by fans of Mexicos
previous abnegation security policies.

12

Given the decay of bilateral institutions for security cooperation, the Fox and Bush
administrations relied, instead, on routine relations between the respective government
agencies without attempting to make use, adapt, or replicate the overarching institutional
architecture for security issues fashioned by the Zedillo and Clinton administrations. They
formalized many of those low-level cooperative security relations in March 2005 when
Presidents Bush and Fox and Canadas Prime Minister Paul Martin, meeting at Bushs
ranch in Crawford, Texas, called them the Security and Prosperity Partnership. (Alas, at the
BushFox meeting in
Guanajuato in February 2001, the bilateral relationship had been called simply Partnership
for Prosperity.)
The Plan Mrida agreement signaled a shift in Mexican international security policy,
emphasizing even closer Mexicos security policy engagement with U.S. counternarcotics
tactics. Mexico would also build up a substantial military capability to advance joint U.S.
Mexican goals in combating drug trafficking and tilted even more toward U.S. suppliers of
weapons. The two governments recognized the need to establish bilateral institutional
procedures to expand and deepen their cooperation, remedying the institutional decay of the
preceding years. The BushCaldern agreement was wholly consistent with the bandwagoning approach to foreign policy first developed under the Salinas and Zedillo
presidencies.
The greatest utility of that bandwagoning strategy for Mexico under Zedillo and Fox had
been to contain (though never terminating) U.S. unilateral actions with regard to Mexico.
There was a new risk in the Caldern administrations approach to the bandwagoning
strategy, however. Its scale was so much larger and the intimacy of cooperation with U.S.
agencies so deep that this lone successful result of the old strategy might become
unachievable as well. It remains to be seen whether the new strategy would succeed in
curtailing drug-related violence, traffic, and consumption while also limiting U.S.
unilateralism with regard to Mexico. For President Caldern, the decision was clear. He
knew that success was difficult but believed that he had no choice but to counter the spike
in criminal violence that his administration had inherited.
THE DOMESTIC CONTEXT FOR FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKING

The domestic context for foreign policy decision-making remained on the same trajectory
during the 2000s as it had been during the 1990s, with one important exception. In Chapter
V, we argued that there had been a multiplication of actors that made, influenced, or
implemented foreign policy decisions in both countries. Moreover, the bureaucracies within
each national government as well as the U.S. Congress developed their own independent
impact on U.S.Mexican relations. Enterprises and groupings within the respective
societies and economies impinged as well on the bilateral relations. We called this domestic
context a multilayered tapestry for decision-making. In general, the U.S. decision-making
entities had always been more fragmented than in Mexico, but in the 1990s the process of
domestic political democratization in Mexico as well as the liberalization of its economy
contributed to fragmentation within Mexico as well. 27 The respective coordinating roles of
13

the State Department and the Foreign Relations Ministry diminished in the 1990s and did
not recover in the 2000s.
In this section, we examine four areas of change in the two countries from the 1990s to the
2000s. First, we argue that the creation of the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) permitted an unusual centralization of power within the U.S.
executive branch; it is the principal exception to the long-standing pattern of U.S.
fragmentation in decision-making. Second, we analyze the changes that pertain to the two
national legislatures. Mexicos democratization opened the gates for a more contentious
Congress, which also became more independent from the presidency, but the impact of
these changes on foreign policy was modest. In the United States, for the first half dozen
years of the new decade the Republican Party controlled the presidency and both chambers
of Congress, lowering the partisan friction between the branches of government, thus
containing congressional impact on foreign policy. Third, democratization in Mexico led to
a Supreme Court more independent from the presidency, which nevertheless remained
supportive of presidential foreign policy. In the United States, in contrast, the Supreme
Court, building on its initiative in the early 1990s, ventured regularly into topics in U.S.
Mexican relations, making their management more difficult, at times undercutting the
authority of the presidency. Finally, we argue that public opinion in both countries remained
largely supportive of good U.S.Mexican relations, notwithstanding some sour notes
especially on the U.S. side.
Mexicos democratization, therefore, had yet to have a positive or negative impact on its
foreign policy whereas bureaucratic empowerment and Supreme Court audacity in the
United States at the margin made the management of bilateral relations more complex.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

The creation of the DHS led to the largest bureaucratic concentration of power in
Washington since the establishment in 1947 of the Defense Department, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. The Homeland Security Act of
2002 created the DHS, with more than 200,000 employees (the third largest federal
agency), in direct response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to consolidate in a single Cabinet
office all the executive branch organizations related to homeland security.28
The creation of this mammoth agency and its absorption of numerous smaller agencies
generated many policy-making disruptions in the U.S. domestic policy arena. In response,
Canada created a comparable agency to accommodate Washingtons bureaucratic changes.
Mexico did not. Policy coordination between DHS and the Mexican federal government
presents, therefore, three main challenges. First, Mexicos Ministry of Government
(Gobernacin) has become the DHS counterpart by default. Yet, Gobernacin has both a
domestic orientation and also proudly retains a nationalistic tradition. Second, DHSs many
concerns touch upon numerous other Mexican agencies, such as the Foreign Ministry, the
Attorney Generals Office (Procuradura General de la Repblica, PGR), and

14

the Ministries of Defense and the Navy, besides Gobernacin. Finally, DHS displaced the
State Department (and by implication also the Mexican Foreign Ministry) from bilateral
responsibility over border affairs.
Congress

Since the establishment of its direct predecessor in 1929, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) controlled the presidency and both
chambers in Congress with overwhelming majorities. Mexicos slow-moving
democratization led in 1997 to the PRIs loss of control over the Chamber of Deputies. In
the 2000 election, the National Action Party (Partido Accin Nacional, PAN) candidate,
Vicente Fox, won the presidencythe first time in Mexican history when an opposition
party won the presidency peacefully and was so recognized by the incumbent. No party
gained control of either legislative chamber. The PRI had the largest number of seats: 42
percent of the 500 seats in the Chamber and 47 percent of the 128 seats in the Senate.
Mexico had passed almost instantly from single-party rule to face the prospects of
executivelegislative gridlock.
Under Mexicos Constitution, the distribution of partisan seats in the Senate had important
implications. The presidency would need support from opposition senators to approve
international treaties and confirm ambassadors and consuls-general, which are prerogatives
of the Mexican Senate. As it turns out, relations between the executive and the legislature
on these important affairs of state worked well.
Fox and the Senate were elected in July 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, the executive
submitted 195 international treaties to the Senate, which approved 176, rejected 6, and had
13 still pending. Odd as it may seem, five of the six treaty rejections reflected the
executives views. The presidency forwards to the Senate all international treaties to which
its diplomats have consented, including many in multilateral organizations; in some cases
these five treaties among themthe agreements violate the constitution with regard to labor
law. The executive fulfills its international obligations by submitting the treaty to the Senate
but it couples its submission with a recommendation from the Labor Ministry that the
Senate should reject the treaty. The Senates acceptance of the Labor Ministrys
recommendation, of course, supports the executive. The Senate thus concurred with the
executive over 181 of 182 executive-submitted treaties.
The Senate rejected just one Fox administration recommendation to ratify a treaty during its
first five years. In the fall of 2005, acting upon the recommendation from the finance and
foreign relations committees, the Senate rejected the Financial Cooperation Accord
between Mexico and the European Investment Bank (EIB) on the grounds that the treaty
accorded too much power to the Finance Ministry, exempted the EIB from all Mexican
federal taxes, and seemed
biased toward the EIB over other financial actors. Senators approved the negative
committee reports on the treaty by a vote of 65 to 6, with 12 abstentions; 12 PAN senators
voted to reject the treaty, with 6 supporting it, and 11 abstaining. The anomalous rejection
15

of this treaty, therefore, was not a partisan act; rather, it reflected the Senates considered
institutional judgment.29
One explanation for legislative behavior in Mexico emphasizes a key institutional feature.
All elected Mexican officials hold office under a strict single-term no-reelection rule. As a
result, all deputies and senators are novices in each and every new session of the
legislature. Very few members of Congress bring foreign policy interest or expertise to their
new responsibilities. Moreover, they face strong incentives to behave in Congress with an
eye toward their next job, which is not likely to be in the foreign policy realm. As a result,
most deputies and senators defer to the presidency in foreign policy.
The same domestic political incentives, however, lead senators at times to use their powers
mainly for domestic political purposes. At the start of the 2000s, legislators used
congressional authority to compel Foreign Relations Secretary Jorge Castaeda to testify in
open chamber. They needled him in the hope that he would lose his temper in these often
tempestuous sessions. To be sure, the power of legislative interpellation is one means for
the executive to explain and justify its policies before legislators and the nation, and one
instrument for legislators to hold the executive accountable.
Less lofty was the Mexican Congresss use of another constitutional prerogative. The
constitution requires the president to seek prior authorization from the Senate and the
Chamber of Deputies before he embarks on a trip outside Mexico. Before 2000, this had
been a mere formality. In the spring 2002, the Senate prevented the president from touring
the western United States and Canada. In 2006, Fox was prevented from attending the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vietnam. That was a presidential election
year; opposition legislators placed domestic partisan objectives ahead of the legitimate need
for the president to represent the nations interests at a meeting of the heads of government
of some of the worlds most important countries.
One early accomplishment of the Caldern administration was to obtain support in both
congressional chambers to amend the constitution to remove the requirement for prior
congressional authorization of the presidents international travel, which may have made
sense in the age before the jet airplane but not in the twenty-first century.
Across the border, in the U.S. national election in 2000 the Republican Party won control of
the White House and both chambers of Congress. Except for a short interlude, the
Republicans retained majorities in both chambers until the November 2006 mid-term
elections, when the Democrats won control also of both chambers. During the half dozen
years of Republican executivelegislative control, the Congress generally supported the
presidents foreign policy and
placed few obstacles in its path. In President Bushs last two years in office, Democrats
increased their oversight of foreign policy but not in ways that much affected U.S. relations
with Mexico.
The U.S. Congress played a decisive role, however, regarding one central issue in U.S.
Mexican relations: the attempt to reform immigration policy. The immigration question
16

divided both political parties, which became evident in the response to President Bushs
initiative in 2004 to change immigration law. The immigration question generated heated
contention during the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 200708. By
the end of the Bush administration, the Congress had enacted new coercive policies but
none of the reforms that President Bush most embraced. We return to the substance of these
immigration issues later in this chapter.
In short, in the 2000s the principal impact of the U.S. Congress upon U.S.Mexican
relations was through the domestic U.S. immigration debate and the repressive bias in its
outcome. The Mexican Congress changed much as a result of democratization and for the
first time had significant power to affect decisions. The Mexican Congress remained
supportive of presidential foreign policy in most instances, however.
The Supreme Court

The Supreme Courts of the United States and Mexico exemplify the proliferation of
decisional units that impinge upon U.S.Mexican relations, which we saw in Chapter V. In
the 2000s, in each country the role of the Courts on foreign policy widened. In particular, in
Chapter V we discussed a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which ruled in the case of Dr.
Humberto lvarez Machan whom U.S. agents had kidnapped in Mexico to bring to trial in
the United States, accusing him of participation in the 1985 torture and murder of U.S.
DEA agent Enrique Camarena. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the kidnapping did not
violate the U.S.Mexico Extradition Treaty because kidnapping was not specified in the
text of that accord.
As a result of that decision, lvarez Machan was tried in U.S. Federal District Court and
acquitted. Upon his return to Mexico, lvarez Machan sued in U.S. Federal District Court
various DEA agents under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging false arrest, and also
several Mexican citizens under the U.S. Alien Tort Statute of 1789, alleging a violation of
the law of nations. A divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for lvarez Machan,
affirming that the Alien Tort Statute gave U.S. courts jurisdiction over a dispute between
two Mexican citizens in Mexico. On June 29, 2004, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court
judgment reversed the decision in the Ninth Circuit, ruling against lvarez Machan. 30 It
would have been astonishing if the Supreme Court had agreed to extend U.S. jurisdiction
inside Mexico, and it was noteworthy that the Supreme Court decisively shut the door to
federal tort claims by Mexican citizens in the United States.
More important was the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Medellin v. Texas, issued on
March 25, 2008. In January 2003, at the urging of Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaeda,
President Fox decided that Mexico should sue the United States before the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) for violating Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular
Relations. Under Article 36, every signatory, the United States among them, must notify a
foreign Consular Office when a citizen from the country that the Consulate represents is
arrested in order to enable the Consulate to provide legal assistance to the accused. Never in
the past had Mexico sued the United States before the ICJ. Castaedas objective was to
compel President Bush to override state laws under pressure from the ICJ, not just from
Mexico. An adverse ICJ ruling would raise the stakes for the representation and defense by
17

U.S. Consuls of the rights of U.S. citizens worldwide. If the United States were not to
comply with the Vienna Convention, why should other states do so when U.S. citizens
break the law in other countries?31
The case became known as Avena and Other Mexican Nationals (Mex. v. U.S.), or Avena
for short. The ICJ ruled in 2004 that the United States had violated the Convention by
failing to inform 51 named Mexican nationals, including the formal petitioner, Medelln, of
their Vienna Convention rights. The ICJ ruled that those named individuals were entitled to
review and reconsideration of their U.S. state-court convictions and sentences regardless of
their failure to comply with generally applicable state rules governing challenges to
criminal convictions.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Sanchez Llamas v. Oregonissued after Avena but involving
individuals not named in the Avena judgmentheld, contrary to the ICJ, that the Vienna
Convention did not preclude the application of state default rules. President Bush then
issued a Memorandum that the United States would discharge its international
obligations under Avena by having State courts give effect to the decision. Relying on
Avena and the presidents Memorandum, Jos Ernesto Medelln, convicted of murder in
Texas, filed for a second Texas state-court habeas corpus application challenging Texas
application of the death sentence on the ground that he had not been informed of his Vienna
Convention rights. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed, concluding that neither
Avena nor the president could displace Texas limitations on filing successive habeas
applications.
By a six-to-three vote, with the Chief Justice delivering the opinion, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that the ICJs Avena judgment was not directly enforceable as domestic law in
state court. The Vienna Convention lacked provisions to make it self-executing as domestic
legislation, and the U.S. Congress had not enacted statutes to implement the provisions at
stake. The presidents Memorandum, in turn, did not override what the Court called its first
principles, notwithstanding the presidents high reasons of state in extending Vienna
Convention rights to citizens in other countries.32
Mexico had been innovative as well as unsuccessful. It won its case before the International
Court but created a new conflict with the Bush administration while failing to prevent the
application of the death penalty to Mexican citizens awaiting the death penalty under state
law in the United States. The case also shows how the U.S. Supreme Court undercut
President Bushs foreign policy by making it impossible for the executive branch to apply
the Vienna Convention notwithstanding the presidents wish to do so.
The Mexican Supreme Court also played a significant role in U.S.Mexican relations but it
did so to facilitate the decisions of the two governments. In 1978, the two countries signed
an extradition treaty that went into effect in 1980. It was used only rarely during its first 14
years. It was revised in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court 1992 lvarez Machan
decision. The number of extraditions between both countries increased in the late 1990s
and, following an amendment to the 1978 treaty that went into effect in 2001, even more so
in the early 2000s.
18

In November 2004, the Supreme Court of Mexico lifted one of the preexisting obstacles to
extradition from Mexico to the United States; it had been hitherto impossible for Mexico to
extradite anyone to a country that could impose a life sentence. Then, in February 2006, the
Supreme Court of Mexico, by a six-to-three vote, ruled that Mexico could not ask the
United States for guarantees beyond those specified in the 1978 treaty. In particular,
Mexico could not ask for a prior guarantee that the rights of those to be extradited would be
respected and no unusual punishment would be applied to them. Upon this decision, only
the death penalty would bar extradition to the United States. As a result of the Supreme
Courts decisions and the policies of Presidents Fox and Caldern, the number of Mexican
extraditions to the United States has risen sharply, as Figure 8.1 shows.

FIGURE 8.1 Extraditions from Mexico to the United States

Source:
MxicoEstados
http://mexico.usembassy.gov.

Unidos

de

un

vistazo:

extradiciones,

in:

The Supreme Courts of both countries demonstrated the existence of varying centers of
authority and power, each with the capacity to facilitate or to hinder bilateral relations. The
U.S. Supreme Court, in particular, hindered the improvement of U.S.Mexican relations in
1992 and 2008, in the latter case undermining the authority of the President of the United
States to manage relations with Mexico.
Public Opinion

We argued in Chapter V that there was a very broad agreement between the publics in the
United States and Mexico regarding some fundamental issues as well as abundant goodwill
among citizens of each country toward the other. These key findings still applied in the
2000s. During the 2000s, however, the opinions that Mexican and U.S. citizens hold toward
each other turned less favorable. The evidence available for this analysis became better
because public opinion polling on these questions in both countries became more common,
as we show in the tables below.
As Table 8.3 shows, U.S. and Mexican citizens held compatible attitudes toward some of
the key international issues of our timethe rise of China and the existence of both
19

international terrorism and undocumented immigration. The only noteworthy change was
the reduced likelihood that Mexicans would label undocumented immigrants a severe
international threat, probably in response to the Fox administrations embrace of all
Mexican emigrants regardless of their legal status.
On economic issues, as Table 8.4 illustrates, there is convergence and divergence. In 2006,
U.S. and Mexican respondents agreed by similar majorities that trade is good for the
economy; U.S. views on this topic had remained unchanged since 2004. 33 However,
whereas U.S. respondents were willing to commit the United States to greater financing of
Mexican development as the price for the right of U.S. firms to invest in the Mexican
energy sector and petroleum
TABLE 8.3 Public Opinion in Mexico and the United States: Percentage in Agreement
regarding Severe International Threats
Mexico

Mexico

U.S.

U.S.

2004

2006

2004

2006

The rise of China

48

47

33

36

International terrorism

81

70

75

74

Undocumented immigrants

50

29

51

40

1500

1499

1195

1227

Source: Centro de Investigacin y Docencia Econmica (CIDE), Consejo Mexicano de

Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI), and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Mxico y
el mundo, 2006 (November 2006), questions COS02 A2, A3, B4.
TABLE 8.4 Public Opinion in Mexico and the United States: Percentage in Agreement
regarding International Economic Cooperation
Mexico

Mexico

U.S.

U.S.

2004

2006

2004

2006

59

57

54

Mex. permits U.S. to invest in Mex. energy & oil and 20

U.S. finances Mex. development

29

77

66

1499

1195

1227

Trade is good for your countrys economy

1500

Source: Centro de Investigacin y Docencia Econmica (CIDE), Consejo Mexicano de

20

Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI), and Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mxico y el

mundo, 2006 (November 2006), question RAN06; Chicago Council on Global Affairs, The
United States and the Rise of China and India: Results of a 2006 Multination Survey of
Public Opinion (Chicago, 2006), 23; Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Global Views
2004: American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (Chicago, 2004), 41; CIDE and
COMEXI, Mexico and the World 2006: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in Mexico
(Mexico, DF, 2006), 49.
specifically, less than a third of Mexicans were willing to accept this deal. Most Mexicans
continued to support national ownership over the Mexican petroleum industry in particular
an enduring legacy since President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated the foreign-owned
petroleum companies in 1938.
Mexicans expressed other cooperative dispositions toward the United States, however, thus
making it clear that their attitudes with regard to the energy sector were indeed sector
specific. For example, the proportion of Mexicans who thought that NAFTA was good for
the Mexican economy increased between 2004 and 2006, when it reached a clear majority.
In 2006, 52 percent of Mexicans also thought that NAFTAs provisions regarding
agriculture should be renegotiated even if Mexico were to lose some of what it had gained
under the agreement. This was probably in response to the 2006 presidential campaign of
Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, who promoted these views albeit in the context of his
general acceptance of NAFTA.
Mexicans supported cooperation with the United States on other issues. Seven out of ten
Mexicans were ready to reach a migration bargain with the United States, whereby the U.S.
government would give greater opportunities for Mexicans to live and work in the United
States in exchange for the Mexican government endeavoring to stop illegal migration and
drug trafficking. Similarly, eight out of ten Mexicans agreed somewhat or strongly agreed
to extradite criminal fugitives to the country where they had committed a crime. In 2004, a
fierce public controversy broke out in Mexico because the government had invited fourteen
U.S. security advisers to work with Mexican security personnel at the Mexico City
international airport and had failed to inform the Mexican Congress in advance. 34 The
Mexican public, however, kept an open mind. Half of Mexicans
were prepared to permit U.S. agents to guard Mexican airports, ports, and the border jointly
with Mexican agents; a majority strongly or somewhat agreed to station U.S. immigration
officers in Mexican airports to expedite the travel of Mexicans to the United States.35
Mexicans retained quite positive feelings toward the United States; they became even more
so between 2004 and 2006. U.S. respondent feelings toward Mexico tumbled, however. The
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations first asked U.S. respondents about their feelings
toward Mexico in 1978. These U.S. feelings toward Mexico had remained positive and
stable to the end of the twentieth century continuing into 2004. For the first time ever, in
2006 the U.S. feelings thermometer toward Mexico fell below 56more seriously, it fell
below 50, as Tables 5.4 and 8.5 show. In 2006, U.S. respondents viewed five countries
mainly positively; Mexico ranked sixth, just ahead of France. 36 In 2005, the Mexican firm
21

IPSOS/BIMSA asked Mexicans for their reasons for holding a good or a bad opinion of the
United States. Foreign policy considerations, such as the war in Iraq or U.S. policies in
various parts of the world, according to this poll, had relatively little impact. Instead, the
key explanation for the views of Mexicans was the experience of Mexicans in the United
States. The top reason for thinking well about the United States was job opportunities and
for thinking badly about the United States, the ill treatment of immigrants. 37 These findings
illustrate even in this arena, in the words of former U.S. House Speaker Thomas P. ONeill,
all politics is localincluding the views that ordinary Mexicans have about the United
States.
For some, local politics equaled transnational politics. The strongest supporters of tighter
integration between the United States and Mexico are the Mexican-Americans who may
well feel happiest in a bigger North American home. Consider three categories of people
who were asked the same survey questions
TABLE 8.5 U.S. and Mexican Attitudes toward Other Countries: Feeling
Thermometer Mean Score
Mexico

Mexico

U.S.

U.S.

2004

2006

2004

2006

China

59

66

44

40

South Korea

52

63

49

44

Japan

68

68

58

Germany

64

57

Mexico

54

47

United States

68

74

1500

1499

1195

1227

Attitudes toward

Source: Centro de Investigacin y Docencia Econmica (CIDE), Consejo Mexicano de

Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI), and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Mxico y
el mundo, 2006 (November 2006), questions ORP02 1, 2, 7, 8, and 10, and Q333.
in 2003: Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and U.S. respondents excluding the MexicanAmericans whom we will call Anglo-Americans. Asked whether they would favor
economic integration between Canada, Mexico, and the United States, out of ten
respondents, six Mexican-Americans, five Mexicans, and four Anglo-Americans agreed.
Asked whether they would favor a common currency, also out of ten respondents in each
category, six Mexican-Americans and four each among the Mexicans and the AngloAmericans agreed. Asked whether they would favor political integration between the three
countries, out of ten respondents, six Mexican-Americans agreed, fewer than four Mexicans
22

did, and only three Anglo-Americans agreed.38 Mexican-Americans were the strongest
backers of one North America.
U.S. and Mexican public opinion remained permissive, that is, the public in each country
was sufficiently supportive of good relations between the United States and Mexico.
Nevertheless, elements adverse to business as usual arose in both countries. U.S.
respondents had a less positive general view of Mexico. Mexicans differed with the United
States over a variety of issues, especially the treatment of Mexicans in the United States.
Governments may act to improve the bilateral relationship knowing that there is work to be
done but that the public is not opposed to better bilateral relations.
NAFTA: ITS IMPACT, DISPUTES, AND DISPUTE RESOLUTION

In the 1980s, investment and especially trade disputes peopled the agenda of presidents and
their advisers as Mexico and the United States faced each other. NAFTA was the remedy
for that problem. In seeking its enactment, the presidents of Mexico and the United States
sold NAFTA to their peoples as if it would cure all ills. In incautious moments, NAFTA
advocates in the United States argued that the agreement would stem the flow of
undocumented migrants from Mexico. In comparably incautious moments in Mexico,
NAFTA advocates implied that Mexico would only benefit and incur no costs. The
overselling of NAFTA created political ill will toward it in years to come. Yet, NAFTA
worked to address the problems for which it was designed as a response. And, politically,
NAFTA removed trade and investment issues from the contentious high-politics agenda by
relying on routine institutionalized problem-solving procedures.
NAFTA was, above all, a trade agreement. We argued in Chapter VI, assessing the results
as of the end of the 1990s, that NAFTA succeeded within its own terms. It fostered trade
and investment impressively and made it much easier to resolve complex trade disputes
through routine procedures. A decade later, the conclusion is the same. As Table 8.1 shows,
U.S. exports to Mexico recovered from the economic recession at the start of the 2000s and
reached a new very high level by 2007. Mexican exports to the United States were less
affected by that recession and jumped dramatically by 2007. Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey
Schott have examined NAFTA in considerable detail. Their conclusion is plain: It has worked. North
American firms have become more efficient and productive. They have restructured to
take advantage of economies of scale in production and intraindustry specialization. U.S.
Mexico trade has grown twice as fast as US trade outside of NAFTA, and foreign
investment in Mexico has soared.39
More worrisome is that the growth rate of Mexicos gross domestic product (GDP) has
been modest in the 2000s. Mexico recovered quickly from its 199495 financial crisis and
grew during the balance of the 1990s. Its economy did not go bust at the start of the 2000s,
as had happened repeatedly in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the U.S.
economy suffered a recession. In the early 2000s, the Mexican economy joined the U.S.
economy in the recessionbut it was only a recession, not another panic. However, the
Mexican economy should have surged in the 2000s, given the benefits of NAFTA access to
23

the remainder of North American markets, yet the growth of Mexican GDP in the 2000s
just matched the growth rate of the U.S. economy.
NAFTA was not designed to have an impact directly on employment and wages, no matter
what its advocates and detractors claimed. On balance, its impact on U.S. employment and
wages was positive but modest. Mexican real wages have not risen since NAFTA went into
effect in 1994. The low growth of Mexican productivity along with exchange rate effects
rather than the effect of international trade are the main explanations. 40 The effect of
technological change on the Mexican economy is the main explanation for the wider wage
gap between skilled and unskilled workers in Mexican manufacturing industries before and
after trade liberalization; the latter helped to prevent the wage gap from becoming even
wider.41 Similarly, increased foreign direct investment flows into Mexico were associated
with decreased income inequality within Mexicos 32 states. 42 The root causes of high
inequality in Mexico precede NAFTA.
Most worrisome has been the impact of NAFTA on certain sectors of Mexican agriculture.
The adjustment cost of NAFTA to Mexican agriculture was underappreciated at the start;
programs to alleviate the adjustment burden were under-funded. Corn, Mexicos largest
crop, occupied two-thirds of the countrys agricultural land. It is a major staple in the
Mexican diet, especially important to the poor. It is also an important cultural artifact,
embedded within the nations imagination. NAFTA greatly facilitated U.S. corn exports to
Mexico. The more U.S. corn Mexicans imported, the less Mexican farmers planted; they
could not compete on price or commodity quality control, even if they still could on taste.
On the eve of NAFTAs implementation, U.S. corn imports supplied only 2 percent of
Mexican consumption; ten years later, such imports accounted for one-fifth of Mexican
consumption.43 Agricultural liberalization under NAFTA enabled many Mexicans to
purchase a much wider variety of food at lower prices but it generated hardship for many
Mexican corn and some other agricultural producers.
NAFTAs direct impact on the environment in Mexico has been negligible. There is little
evidence that NAFTA has increased the likelihood that firms operating in Mexico have a
superior environmental record or have improved their environmental performance thanks to
NAFTA. Similarly, NAFTA did not make Mexico a pollution haven; dirty industry in the
United States did not flock to Mexico. Unfortunately, a number of environmental
conditions did worsen in Mexico but that was because the governments did not implement
effective environmental policies that might have caused better environmental outcomes.
NAFTA was neither a blessing nor a curse.44
NAFTAs most impressive accomplishment is political. It was implemented largely in
accordance with its terms. Notwithstanding the enormous disparity of power and capacity
between Canada, Mexico, and the United States, all three countries complied. They
eliminated tariffs and quotas. They met market access commitments. There have been some
notable instances of apparent noncompliance with the terms of NAFTA. The United States
resisted opening its borders to cross-border trucking despite its clear NAFTA obligation to
do so. Seven years after it should have happened, on September 8, 2007, the first Mexican
eighteen-wheeler cargo truck crossed into Texas at Laredo, headed for North Carolina as
part of the implementation of a highly restrictive U.S. pilot program that permitted Mexican
24

trucks to enter the United States. Mexico delayed providing market access for U.S. express
courier services, while Canada imposed restrictions on split-run periodicals. Given an
agreement as vast as NAFTA, these violations are insignificant. Moreover, NAFTA was
designed to increase the number of trade disputes because the larger the volume of trade,
the more likely trade friction becomes. In general, such dispute settlement has worked well.
The judgments of NAFTA panels have been observed for the most part in compliance with
the terms rendered.45
More importantly, NAFTA has channeled all but a few trade disputes into institutionalized
channels for routine problem-solving of disputes. At most a handful of trade disputes
require the attention of the presidents or senior officials in the two governments. NAFTA
has unburdened the bilateral agenda from a great many hitherto highly politicized trade
disputes. Thus its final success is somewhat bittersweet: It freed the presidential agenda to
permit presidents and their governments to focus on security and migration disputes
between the United States and Mexico, in the knowledge that NAFTA would handle well
nearly all trade disputes.
EVOLUTION OF TRADE AND INVESTMENT PATTERNS

Consistent with expected NAFTA effects, Mexico became and remained one of the
principal U.S. trade partners. During the 2000s, as Table 8.1 shows, Mexico has been
consistently second only to Canada in its importance as an export market for the United
States. Since 2003, it has been third, behind China and Canada, as
source of U.S. imports. It has been a more important trade partner for the United States than
Japan, Germany, or the United Kingdom.
As Tables 8.6 and 8.7 demonstrate, one effect of NAFTA is that the United States became
the destination of approximately four-fifths of the value of Mexican exports, though
Mexico diversified its exports slightly during the 2000s. On the imports side, the picture is
more complex. Between 1995 and 2007, the
TABLE 8.6 Main Sources of Mexican Imports (percentage)
Year

Total

U.S.

EUa

LACb

Japan

China

Other

1970

100

63.6

25.7

5.8

4.3

n.a

0.6

1980

100

66.9

13.7

5.7

5.4

n.a

8.3

1990

100

64.6

15.5

5.1

4.7

n.a

10.1

1995

100

74.3

9.4

2.1

5.5

0.7

8.1

2000

100

73.1

8.6

2.6

3.7

1.7

10.3

2001

100

67.6

9.9

3.1

4.8

2.4

12.3

25

2002

100

63.2

10.0

3.6

5.5

3.7

13.9

2003

100

61.8

10.8

4.4

4.5

5.5

13.1

2004

100

56.3

11.0

5.2

5.4

7.3

14.8

2005

100

53.4

11.6

5.5

5.9

8.0

15.6

2006

100

50.9

11.3

5.4

6.0

9.5

16.9

2007

100

49.6

11.9

5.0

5.8

10.5

17.1

Source: Mxico, Secretara de Economa, with data from Banco de Mxico.

Notes
a

Spain and Portugal entered in 1986; last expansion was in 2007 with Rumania and
Bulgaria.
b

Latin American and Caribbean countries; Panama included.

TABLE 8.7 Mexican Exports by Main Destination (percentage)

Year

Total

U.S.

EUa

LACb

Japan

China

Other

1970

100

68.2

7.8

13.3

6.1

n.a.

5.3

1980

100

65.4

0.0

7.1

4.5

n.a.

16.1

1990

100

70.7

12.2

7.3

5.3

n.a.

4.5

1995

100

82.0

4.7

5.5

1.3

0.3

6.3

2000

100

88.0

0.9

2.9

0.7

0.2

7.3

2001

100

85.9

1.0

3.2

0.8

0.2

8.9

2002

100

88.1

0.9

2.8

0.7

0.4

7.0

2003

100

87.6

1.0

2.7

0.7

0.6

7.4

2004

100

87.5

0.9

3.2

0.6

0.5

7.2

2005

100

85.7

1.1

3.9

0.7

0.5

8.0

2006

100

84.7

1.1

4.4

0.6

0.7

8.4

2007

100

82.1

1.3

5.4

0.7

0.7

9.8

Source: Mxico, Secretara de Economa, with data from Banco de Mxico.

26

Notes
a

Spain and Portugal entered in 1986; last expansion was in 2007 with Rumania and
Bulgaria.
b

Latin American and Caribbean countries; Panama included.

value of Mexican imports from the United States increased four-fold, rising each and every
year during the 2000s. Yet, Mexico succeeded in diversifying its sources of imports
impressively during this decade. China and Canada (included in Other) and, to a lesser
extent, the European Union (EU) made significant strides. Between 1995 and 2007,
Mexicos imports increased five-fold from the EU and 57-fold from China. Chinas share of
Mexican imports was on track to exceed the European Unions share by the end of the
centurys first decade.
The story of foreign direct investment in Mexico resembles the story of Mexican imports.
Annual total inflows of foreign investment into Mexico doubled between the 1990s and the
2000s. Foreign direct investment flows from the United States followed the same pattern.
The big story, however, was foreign investment flows from other countries, in particular
those from European Union countries. As a result, as Table 8.8 shows, the U.S. share of
foreign direct investment in Mexico fell on average from about two-thirds in the late 1990s
to about half in the early 2000s.
In sum, trade and investment relations within North America were buoyant during the first
decade of the twentieth century. NAFTAs liberal framework welcomed as well as increased
international economic transactions between the United States and Mexico, on the one
hand, and, on the other, many other countries including China and the European Union. The
experience of trade and investment in North America was one of generalized gains. This
macro story confirmed the within-NAFTA micro story. The governments of Mexico and the
United States had been freed to focus on other challenges. We turn now to analyze the most
important of those challenges, namely, international migration.
TABLE 8.8 Mexicos Annual Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
Total FDI

United States FDI

U.S. FDI

(millions of dollars)

(millions of dollars)

(percentage of FDI)

1994

10,646.9

4,966.5

46.6

1995

8,374.6

5,514.8

65.9

1996

7,847.9

5,281.1

67.3

1997

12,145.6

7,420.3

61.1

1998

8,373.5

5,467.0

65.3

Year

27

1999

13,728.3

7,438.2

54.2

2000

17,976.7

12,864.2

71.6

2001

29,483.2

21,365.3

72.5

2002

23,048.7

12,958.7

56.2

2003

16,594.3

9,283.8

55.9

2004

22,883.2

8,529.2

37.3

2005

20,945.4

10,584.3

50.5

2006

19,088.1

11,987.8

62.8

2007

22,845.5

9,770.9

42.8

Source:
Instituto
Nacional
de
http://www.inegi.gob.mx/inegi/default.aspx.

Estadstica

Geografa,

FAILED IMMIGRATION EFFORTS: BILATERAL (2001) AND UNILATERAL

(200407) INITIATIVES

At the end of January 2001, while in Davos, Switzerland, Jorge Castaeda, just recently
appointed Foreign Relations Secretary, received a phone call from Juan Jos Bremer, who
had also just been appointed Mexican Ambassador to Washington. Bremer told Castaeda
that President Bush had accepted President Foxs invitation to travel to Mexico to visit
Foxs ranch in San Cristbal, Guanajuato. Castaeda understood that Bushs visit sent a
clear message: relations with Mexico would be a priority for Bushs newly elected
administration. Thus Castaeda advised Fox to take advantage of Bushs willingness to
tackle the issue that had long been neglected by both countriesthe increasing flow of
undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United Statesthrough a comprehensive
immigration agreement.
Immigration issues had not been given such joint presidential priority since the 1950s and
1960s, when the Bracero programs were implemented (see Chapter VII). Fox and
Castaeda hoped to go down in history as the masterminds behind a new immigration
agreement whose significance would be comparable to NAFTA. The new immigration
agreement would affect the still-unfolding largest migratory flow from Mexico to the
United States in the history of the two countries.46 It would legalize millions of
undocumented Mexicans who at this time represented more than half of the largest
undocumented immigration pool ever to have lived in the United States.47
The 2001 plan for a bilateral agreement over the movement of Mexicans to the United
States would fail, however. President Bushs unilateral initiative, announced in 2004, for
the United States to enact some reforms would fail as well. By the end of the Fox and Bush
presidencies, Mexican immigrants to the United States still faced tough times.
28

The Bush immigration reform initiative, in particular, generated a heated U.S. national
debate that lasted from January 2004 to May 2007, when the Senate majority leader
dropped the attempt to bring the bill to a vote.48 During this time, anti-immigrant groups
seized the national spotlight in the United States. Moreover, upon the defeat of immigration
reform in Congress, federal, state, and local governments took the opportunity to enact
various anti-immigration initiatives. Federal government policies sought to further control
the U.S. Mexican border and enforce immigration laws at the workplace. State and local
governments wanted to limit health care and education services hitherto available to
immigrants.
After years of exertion on behalf of immigration reform, Mexico and Mexican immigrants
faced the stick but had not gotten the carrots they most wantedthe regularization of
undocumented workers and the enactment of guest worker programs.
The Fox and Castaeda Immigration Gambit

Four goals helped to shape Foxs and Castaedas attempt to negotiate a comprehensive
immigration agreement: 1. Solve key pending issue in U.S.Mexican relationsthe
migration of Mexicans. 2. Apply the same diplomatic approach first used in the early 1990s
by President Salinas: institutionalize the management of bilateral issues through agreements
and targeted mechanisms. 3. Take advantage of the positive momentumthe honeymoon
phaseat the outset of the Fox and Bush administrations. 4. Move towards a greater
integration of the countries in North America, the so-called NAFTA plus in Foxs
diplomacy.
By 2000, immigration had become one of the two (the other being drug trafficking and
associated criminality) most contested issues in U.S.Mexican relations. During previous
decades, the U.S. and Mexican governments had paid limited attention to immigration
issues.49 As the former governor of Guanajuatoa traditional region of emigrationFox
was sensitive about migration issues and had first-hand knowledge of the troubles that
Mexican immigrants faced in the U.S. He thought that the prevalent status quo on
immigration was unsustainable: in 2000 alone, 460 Mexicans had lost their lives trying to
reach American soil.50 Fox believed that it was unacceptable for two countries that had
established sophisticated trade relations through NAFTA to have done so little to create
agreements and mechanisms to manage migration flows. Therefore, when Bush came to
Guanajuato just three weeks after taking office, Fox took the opportunity to denounce the
status quo on migration and propose a comprehensive agreement to solve the migration
problem.
In the 1990s, however, changes in U.S. policy toward illegal immigrants had made the
crossing more dangerous for these migrants and had failed to provide a satisfactory
outcome for the United States. The Clinton administration tightened control over the U.S.
Mexican border in an effort to slow down the flow of illegal immigrants coming from
Mexico and Central America. By 2000, however, it was clear that the physical barriers
between Tijuana and San Diego and the sharp increase in border patrol staffing 51 had not
stopped the flow of illegal immigrants. These U.S. measures had had three unexpected
consequences. First, the routes that illegal immigrants followed shifted toward the less
29

inhabitable parts of the border, especially the desert between Sonora and Arizona, resulting
in more casualties as people tried to cross. Second, because it was harder to cross, people
found a greater need to hire professional smugglers or polleros, which increased the
number of smugglers and strengthened this criminal activity. Finally, the migration flow of
Mexicans to the United States lost its circularity. Mexican migration to the United States
from the mid-1990s onwards became the same as most other migration flows in the world:
immigrants stayed in the host country. The attempt to shut down the border had little impact
on the long-term flows of Mexican migrants to the United States and it decreased the
likelihood that Mexicans would ever return home.52
Prior to becoming Foreign Relations Secretary, Castaeda had highlighted the necessity to
improve the status quo of Mexican migrants to the United States through a new agreement.
In 1996 he published an article that praised the Bracero programs and argued that Mexico
should aim for the legal departure of a significant number of migrants each year via
negotiations with the United States.53 He thus proposed to return to the approach initially
employed by Carlos Salinas, which involved negotiating agreements to address salient
issues in U.S.Mexican relations. The Salinas administration had addressed trade and
investment. The time had come to tackle the problem of migration through a
comprehensive agreement. Moreover, Foxs victory over the PRI helped to consolidate
democracy in Mexico. Castaeda characterized Foxs popularity at the beginning of his
term and the optimism that it generated as a democratic dividend. He claimed that
Mexico deserved special treatment for having achieved a democratic victory. In his view,
the two countries could finally conduct business as equals.54
The FoxCastaeda proposal had five main components: 1. establishment of a guest worker
program; 2. earned regularization of legal status for undocumented immigrants who
complied with specified criteria; 3. socioeconomic development projects in Mexicos
traditional immigrant-sending regions; 4. bilateral cooperation over border administration
and security; and 5. facilitating family reunification.
This agenda owes much to the formulation put forth in the report of a private binational
task force co-chaired by Mexican Ambassador Andrs Rozental (Secretary Castaedas
close friend and half-brother) and President Clintons first White House chief of staff,
Thomas Mack McClarty. One task force member was Jorge Castaeda. The task force
described the problem as still insufficiently understood in 2000: Altogether, more than 8
million Mexican-born persons are currently estimated to be living in the United States; of
that total more than one third lack legal status.55 (In 2005, the size of the entire
unauthorized population in the United States was estimated at 11.1 million people; some 5
million of these were Mexican.)56
Washington took seriously the ambitious migration proposal that Fox and Castaeda put
forth in February 2001. For the Bush administration, this was an opportunity to demonstrate
its interest in international issues and in Mexico.57 Bush was personally receptive. As
Governor of Texas, he came to respect Mexican-origin people and welcomed their
contribution to economy and society in Texas. In addition, the United States had
experienced an economic boom during the second half of the 1990s, which augured well
for a bilateral migration agreement. By the decades end, the U.S. economy was almost at
30

full employment, with a mere 4.5 percent unemployment rate. This promising economic
outlook explains the favorable views toward immigration expressed by key actors in U.S.
politics. For example, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board,
highlighted the significant contributions of immigrants to the U.S. economy.
The AFLCIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations)
changed its anti-immigration stance to a more moderate view, which accepted allowing
immigrants if they were to take jobs that U.S. citizens did not want.
Foxs main foreign policy objective was to move toward a more integrated North American
economic community. Castaeda described Foxs idealism as a rosy picture of a
hypothetical North American Economic Community, along European lines, associating
Mexico with the United States and Canada.58 That is why Fox, as president-elect, referred
to his vision of Mexico and the United States with open borders when he visited Bush in
Dallas, Texas, in September 2000. For Fox, a migration agreement would be an important
building block to construct an economic community in North America that would thus
incorporate a new social chapter into NAFTA.
The U.S. Response to the Mexican Proposal

The Bush administration, eager to reach an understanding with Mexico, soon became
somewhat baffled by the Fox administration proposal upon closer examination. Consider
the five key elements in that proposal, mentioned above. All but one required the United
States to make all the concessions and Mexico to make none. As Bush administration
officials saw it, the United States was responsible for actions; Mexico was responsible for
applauding such U.S. actions. The United States would change its laws to:
1. Take in Mexican workers,
2. Regularize the status of undocumented migrants who had already broken U.S. law to
enter the United States,
3. Facilitate family reunification by allowing the newly regularized Mexican migrants to
bring in their relatives to the United States, and
4. Invest vast sums to develop those Mexican regions that are the sources of the largest
numbers of potential violators of U.S. entry laws.
Admittedly, receiving guest workers is most likely in the U.S. interest, as it is in the U.S.
interest to drain the pool of illegality that could breed further illegal behavior. Yet, the only
hint that the Mexican government would actually contribute anything to address these U.S.
problems was the suggestion that Mexican authorities would cooperate with the United
States over border administration and security. In bilateral negotiations, U.S. diplomats
underlined the importance of border cooperation as the one clear gain that the U.S.
government expected from its cooperation with Mexico. 59 On balance, however, as U.S.
Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow put it in his memoirs, the concept that there would be U.S.
31

Mexican negotiations over migration was little more than an effort to convert American
law into a grand bargain.60
Mexico might have but did not make formal proposals that might have interested the United
States. Mexico could have welcomed its U.S. and Canadian NAFTA partners to co-manage
Mexicos southern border with Central America because it was the same southern border
for all of North America. Mexico could have proposed the establishment of procedures at
its northern boundary to deter the emigration of those Mexican citizens who lacked proper
documentation to enter another country. Mexico could have offered to reform its labor laws
to enable citizens of its NAFTA partners to work in Mexico, just as it was hoping that the
partners would change their labor laws.
Equally baffling to the Bush administration was Secretary Castaedas insistence that the
migration negotiations depended on the procedures of a single undertaking that
characterized trade negotiations, namely, no part of the agreement would be approved until
all parts were approved. Given the enormity of what the Fox administration was asking
from the Bush administration, what Secretary Castaeda called colloquially the whole
enchilada approach was unreasonable. Yet, the United States signed on at first.61
On August 9, 2001, Secretary Castaeda and Government Secretary Santiago Creel met in
Washington with their counterparts, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General
John Ashworth. At the joint press conference, Secretary Powell tried to convey
Washingtons growing reservation about Mexicos full-court press for a rapid agreement on
highly complex immigration issues. Powell said, We are in no hurry. 62 The reason was
plain. There had been very little progress on the key issues of regularization, temporary
workers, and visa policy review. Given that Mexico had offered so little, the problem was
entirely on the U.S. side. The Justice Department was reluctant to enact the changes that
Mexico wanted. Republicans in Congress had informed the White House that legalization
of undocumented aliens would alienate the presidents political base. Very little had been
accomplished since the BushFox hugs in Guanajuato by the time when Fox visited
Washington on a state visit in early September 2001. As Ambassador Davidow would put it,
It later became conventional wisdom in Washington and Mexico City to assert that the two
governments might have reached an understanding on immigration if the terrorists had not
struck. But this is not an accurate reflection of the likely possibilities at the time of the state
visit. By that time, the presidents team decided not to risk support among his political
base by developing a dramatic new plan in immigration. 63 The September 11 terrorists
fired only the second shot that killed the bilateral migration deal. For reasons sketched
already earlier in this chapter, U.S.Mexican relations drifted apart.64
From the Failed Bilateral Agreement to the Failure of Unilateral
Immigration Reform

Foxs immigration proposal helped to ignite a debate in the United States about
immigration reform. It made President Bush realize that there was an urgent need to change
the status quo on immigration, and led him to call on Congress to enact an immigration
reform bill, denouncing what he called an immigration system that does not work, which he
eventually redefined as a broken immigration system. 65 In January 2004, Bush presented
32

a detailed immigration reform proposal, including the creation of a guest worker program
and a tax-preferred savings account that the immigrants could access upon returning to their
country of origin. The president did not shut the door to eventual citizenship but did not
provide a blueprint for regularization. The proposal would also increase border enforcement
and step up efforts to ensure that business firms comply with U.S. law.66
Bushs proposal elicited a serious response from Congress. Several attempts were made to
change immigration policy. These bills fell into three categories. First, some aimed at a
comprehensive pro-immigration reform; all of these eventually failed. The two most salient
were sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-AZ) in the
109th Congress, and by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in the 110th Congress.
The second group of bills included partial pro-immigration initiatives, all of which would
also be defeated. Among these the most relevant were the Ag Jobs and the Dream Act. The
first, introduced by Senator Kennedy and Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), aimed to regularize
more than half a million agricultural workers. The Dream Act, introduced by Senator
Richard Durbin (D-IL), sought to allow undocumented youths to attend U.S. state
universities and colleges paying in-state tuition. Finally, there were various initiatives
designed to toughen immigration enforcement. Two of these passed: the Real I.D. Act, also
known as the Sensenbrenner Bill (2005), and the Secure Fence Act (2006), which approved
the construction of a 700-mile long fence along the U.S.Mexican border.
The congressional activity caused a heated debate of truly national proportions. According
to one poll, in mid-summer of 2007, 86 percent of the American public had followed the
debate.67 The anti-immigrant groups enjoyed two advantages: the focus on security created
by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and signals that the U.S. economy was slowing down in
2007. Anti-immigrant groups benefited greatly from popular radio and television pundits
who used the immigration debate to increase the publics anxiety in the midst of concerns
about international terrorism and the globalization of markets. The most prominent of these
was Lou Dobbs, anchor of CNNs Lou Dobbs Tonight, whose audience grew 72 percent
between 2003 and 2007. For example, Dobbs reported that one-third of the inmates in the
federal prison system were illegal immigrants, when in fact
only 6 percent of prisoners in the United States are non-citizens, which is below the
estimated proportion of undocumented immigrants that live in the U.S. Dobbs claimed that
an invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans, even a
supposed epidemic of leprosy in the United States!68
The Mexican government did not help its own public relations case, however. It published a
guide for Mexican migrants who were considering crossing the border. The guide warned
that it was dangerous to cross the Rio Grande/Ro Bravo alone and at night and also that
heavy clothing picked up more water at the crossing, making swimming more difficult and
sinking more likely. The guide advised, If you cross the desert, be sure to walk during the
time of day when the heat is not so intense. The guide also observed, Salt with water
helps to retain body liquidsIf you drink water with salt, the risk of dehydration is much
less. The Gua insisted that it was not designed to promote the crossing of the boundary by
Mexicans who lacked the U.S. entry documentation. Rather, its aim was to inform about the
risks implied in such crossings and to advise the migrants about the rights they had,
33

regardless of their legal status.69 The guide could be and was read, however, by antiimmigration radio and TV personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs, precisely
as a how-to manual for illegal crossings.
Pro-immigration movements had moments of glory but not effectiveness. In the spring of
2006, millions of immigrants took part in street demonstrations in many U.S. cities to
pressure Congress to abandon the severe measures (such as classifying illegal immigration
as a felony) that the U.S. House of Representatives had approved in December 2005,
known as the Sensenbrenner Law. In Los Angeles and Chicago, more than 400,000
protestors took to the streets. These large popular protests inspired pro-immigration interest
groups and lawmakers in Congress and helped to dilute the harshest provisions of the
Sensenbrenner Law. Immigrants lack lasting political power, however, because they cannot
vote in U.S. elections.
In March 2006, a national survey of 2,000 adults conducted by the Pew Research Center
found that: Americans [were] increasingly concerned about immigration. A growing
number believe[d] that immigrants are a burden to the country, taking jobs, housing, and
creating strains on the health care system. Many people also worried about the cultural
impact of the growing number of newcomers in the US. When asked whether Immigrants
today are a burden because they take jobs, housing, and health care, in September 2000
only 38% agreed; in March of 2006, that percentage had risen to 52%. Similarly, in May
2007, a New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll of 1,125 adults asked, How serious a
problem do you think the issue of illegal immigration is for the country right now? In
response, 61% said very serious and 30% somewhat serious. Nevertheless, the 2006
Pew survey also found that 80% of the public believes that Latin American immigrants are
hardworking and possess
strong family values; only 37% believed that immigrants often went on welfare; while only
33% thought that they significantly increased crime.
The principal changes, however, were Bush administration actions, such as the increased
frequency of immigration raids, tougher enforcement of the immigration laws at the U.S.
Mexico border and elsewhere, and implementation of the legislative mandate to build long
stretches of fence along the border between Mexico and the United States (i.e. in the
Arizona-Sonora region).70 These measures created a climate of fear among Mexican and
Central American immigrants who are the majority of undocumented immigrants in the
United States.
Bush administration decisions should be placed in perspective, however. Consider one
indicator: border patrol funding and staffing. Between 1986 and 2002, border patrol
funding rose 519% and border patrol staffing, 221%. The upward trend was steady
throughout that time.71 In effect, the Bush administration, notwithstanding the presidents
hopes to change aspects of immigration policy, merely extended the long series of
restrictive measures, none of which had stopped migration flows in the long run.
According to the National Governors Association, there has also been an unprecedented
activity in state legislatures about immigration since the debate spiked in 2004. Hundreds of
34

bills were introduced, most of them aiming to control and reduce undocumented
immigration. Colorado, Arizona, Virginia, and Oklahoma stand out for their harsh
application of anti-immigration measures. However, according to a study sponsored by the
Immigration Policy Institute in Washington D.C., most initiatives at the state and local
levels are ineffective in practice.72 Moreover, some states like Colorado, which enacted
harsh anti-migrant measures in late 2006, eventually changed course in order to seek once
again to attract immigrant workers to the state.73
In sum, President Foxs initial efforts to change the immigration status quo failed. At the
end of the second Bush administration, the immigration debate had led to a more adverse
situation for Mexican immigrants in the United States, both for those already in the country
as well as for those trying to enter. The new border barriers seem to have had a temporary
deterring impact. According to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center, in early 2007 there was
downward trend in the flow of undocumented migration from Mexico as a result of the
cumulative tightening of the borderthe construction of fences, increased presence of the
border patrol, the posting of the National Guard, and the deployment of technology to
secure the border.74
Yet, as we have noted, research on similar measures in place since the start of the 1990s
indicates that the principal impact of such restrictive policies is to transform the longstanding seasonal, cyclical, or circular migration flow, whereby Mexicans entered the
United States for a time and voluntarily returned to Mexico, into a permanent inflow. Once
crossing into the United States becomes
so difficult, if you succeed, dont go backjust stay. If these past findings hold, then the
net effect of these restrictive measures will be to increase the number of permanent
Mexican immigrants in the United States.
The failed immigration reform did nurture a trend toward a consensus in the United States:
in a world past September 11, the United States requires a legal and orderly migration flow.
Many believe that there should be immigration reform in the United States to achieve
greater order and legalization but there is no consensus on how to achieve this goal. This
explains the impasse in Congress in 200708.
The next opportunity to achieve U.S. immigration reform may occur upon the inauguration
of a new president in 2009. Both presidential candidates in 2008, Republican John McCain
and Democrat Barack Obama, understood that immigration is an important issue that needs
to be tackled and that immigrants generate economic benefits. Mexican president Felipe
Caldern was fully aware that Mexican immigrants in the United States have suffered the
consequences that stricter immigration enforcement has created. Regularization of the
circumstances of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States remains a Mexican
government objective.

35

The Long-existing Legal Movement of Peoples between the United

States and Mexico

Discussions of undocumented immigrants in the United States often obscure the fact that
very large numbers of Mexicans enter the United States lawfully every day. Table 8.9
shows that not fewer than four million Mexicans have been admitted lawfully with U.S.
nonimmigrant visas to the United States each and every year during this decade. In 2006,
700 Mexicans per hour entered the United States as lawful nonimmigrants to visit, engage
in business, shop, or study. Their engagement with the United States serves the interests of
both peoples. In addition, about a million people per day cross the U.S.Mexican border 75
to carry on their business in the region within 25 miles of the border (see next section).
Tables 8.9 and 8.10 show a more problematic trend in the number of lawful permanent
migration from Mexico to the United States. Their number had exceeded 200,000 on
average each and every year during the 1990s. One additional impact of the U.S. security
measures enacted in response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 was to reduce
substantially the flow of lawful Mexican immigration to the United States. In turn, fewer
authorizations for legal permanent migration create incentives for migration without proper
documents. The combination of reduced opportunities for lawful permanent migration and
more restrictive border measures against undocumented migration makes it more likely that
undocumented migrants who manage to enter the United States choose to remain in this
country.
TABLE 8.9 Legal Entries from Mexico to the United States, 200007

Nonimmigrant admissions

Legal permanent residents Naturalizations

2000

4,125,998

173,493

189,051

2001

4,334,330

205,560

102,736

2002

4,183,991

218,822

76,310

2003

4,307,144

115,585

55,946

2004

4,454,054

175,411

63,840

2005

4,774,161

161,445

77,089

2006

6,146,122

173,749

83,979

2007

n.a.

148,640

122,258

36

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2006,

Table 27; Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2007, Tables 3 and 21; http://www.dhs.gov
accessed July 14, 2008.
TABLE 8.10 Legal Permanent Immigrants from Mexico to the United States, 19602008

Number
of
immigrants

legal

Mexican Annual average

immigrants

196069

441,824

44,182

197079

621,218

62,122

198089

1,009,586

100,959

199099

2,757,418

275,742

200007

1,352,084

169,011

of

legal

Mexican

Source: Calculated from U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration

Statistics, Table 27; http://www.dhs.gov accessed July 14, 2008.
Yet another effect of the U.S. measures enacted in response to the September 11 terrorist
attacks seems to have been the construction of even more obstacles for naturalization. The
number of new naturalizations of Mexican-origin persons in the United States thus fell
from 2000 to 2003, though it recovered as these Mexican-origin migrants chose
permanency in the United States over returning to Mexico.
THE BORDER

The U.S.Mexico border was the geographic site most affected by the U.S. response to the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At the start of their respective terms of office, the
Fox and Bush administrations had focused on the inefficiencies of border crossings, which
were a bottleneck to NAFTA-facilitated trade expansion. There was a growing conviction at
the border region and in Washington D.C. and Mexico City that big investments in
infrastructure were necessary at the border in order to grow the NAFTA trade (construct
new and
fix old bridges, build binational sewer systems, and so forth) in order to develop the border
region as an integrated economic zone.

37

The terrorist attacks, however, compelled a sharp change in the perception of the border
from Washington, from an economic region that badly needed investment to a vulnerable
security zone. Ambassador Carlos Rico, President Calderns Undersecretary for North
American Affairs,76 explains the transformation in Washingtons perspective of the U.S.
Mexico border as follows: With the creation of the Homeland Security Department (DHS),
other federal agenciesthe Departments of Justice, Treasury, and Statealmost vanished
from the management of the border. DHS handles more than 90 percent of the total federal
budget assigned to the border and classifies all border topics as matters of concern for
domestic security; it sees all policy-making through a prism of control and security. Thus
DHS has stopped almost every attempt to improve the efficiency of border crossing.
Consider the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection lines, called
SENTRI for short. The SENTRI system identifies travelers who pose no security risk and
allows them to cross using dedicated commuter lanes. Program participants are issued
machine-readable cards and transponders for their vehicles. SENTRI participants submit to
extensive background checks, finger-printing, photographing, and registration. SENTRI
lines are excellent tools to speed up the border crossing processusually taking only a few
minutesfor businesses as well as persons with legitimate interests on both sides of the
border. Yet, it took DHS almost five years to authorize the construction of three additional
SENTRI lines (in 2008, there were altogether nine SENTRI lines operating along the
entire U.S.Mexican border).77
U.S. border crossing cards (BCCs) are another successful procedure to expedite lawful
border crossings by Mexicans into the United States. BCCs are laser visas issued to
frequent crossers to enter a defined border zone of 25 miles of U.S. territory north of the
border for a period of 72 hours or less without a U.S. visa. In 2004, 6.8 million Mexican
citizens held BCCs. Similarly, the CustomsTrade Partnership against Terrorism expedited
customs procedures at ports of entry for businesses that voluntarily adopted security
procedures under the direction of U.S. customs. Many of the largest businesses engaged in
North American trade have registered; they are eligible to use FAST (Free and Secure
Trade) lanes at the border for expedited processing.78
Nevertheless, six years after September 11, 2001, a Mexican border think tank, El Colegio
de la Frontera Norte, assessed the efficiency of five ports of entry at the U.S.Mexico
border, concluding that bottlenecks at U.S.Mexico land ports increased since the
September 11 attacks. These bottlenecks impeded bilateral commerce because time delays
impose a large operational cost on trans-border companies. Since 2001, there has been a
shift to much harsher inspection policies at U.S. border points of entry, making it harder for
binational commerce to
develop. In Tijuana, Baja California, every year 64 million people, 5.5 million passenger
vehicles, and 1.4 million commercial vehicles cross the border. At the Tijuana port of entry,
the proportion of people who wait for 60 minutes or more to cross the border has gone up
12%; the proportion of vehicles that have to wait for 60 minutes or more has risen 32%. In
another border state, Sonora, time delays occur because of the military presence. At
Nogales, Sonora, 58% of the people who cross the border attribute the added delays to this
38

factor. Across the border region, waiting time at the border is up by at least 6% at almost
every crossing point.79
To be sure, the increased power of drug cartels and criminal organizations in areas along
the Mexican side of the border has deepened the concern in both countries about border
security and helps to explain the increased deployment of security personnel to the border
region.80 This is especially worrisome at three border towns, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros,
and Ciudad Juarez. Even though the crossing between Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and
Laredo, Texas, accounts for the largest fraction of U.S.Mexican trade, in 2007 exceeding
$100 billion, drug traffickers and organized crime operate with impunity in this region.
As a result, in early 2005 U.S. officials claimed that Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, was
spinning out of control. This Mexican city alone accounted for 27 kidnappings of U.S.
citizens.81 In response to this increased violence, in January 2005 U.S. Ambassador to
Mexico, Tony Garza, sent an open letter to Mexican law enforcement officials expressing
his concern for the increasing violence on the border. In February 2005, the State
Department issued a travel advisory warning, informing U.S. citizens about the growing
violence in some Mexican border cities. 82 In July 2005, after a very violent confrontation
between drug traffickers, Ambassador Garza temporarily closed the U.S. Consulate in
Nuevo Laredo, claiming that even its employees were at risk.83
In mid-2006, President Bush announced the deployment of 15,000 National Guards to help
to patrol the southern border against both organized crime and undocumented migrants. 84
This was followed by the Secure Fence Act, signed into law by President Bush in October
2006, which mandated the construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.Mexican border.
This law required the Department of Homeland Security to install an intricate system of
surveillance cameras along the ArizonaMexico border.85
And yet, consider the oldest fence at the U.S.Mexican border, which was built in 1990
between Tijuana and San Diego. This concrete fence rises up to 15 feet. High-intensity
lights bathe the area around the fence. The U.S. Border Patrol employs 24-hour surveillance
cameras. Yet, border patrol agents report that individuals routinely manage to scramble over
all of these fences in less than one minute.86
Upon his inauguration in December 2006, President Felipe Caldern agreed that
lawlessness on the Mexican side of the border had become unacceptable for
Mexico. As noted earlier, the president deployed tens of thousands of Mexican troops to
combat organized drug cartels across Mexico. Many of these troops were deployed to
Mexicos border cities in an attempt to restore public order.
A borderless North America was not in the making. [T]he people who die in the desert
seeking to enter the United States without documents are not criminals, Vicente Fox wrote
in his memoirs. They are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. They are pioneers, like
the brave people who built your country and mine, crossing deserts in search of a dream.
Our sin was greater, mine and George Bushs, because in Mexico we have failed to provide
them the jobs they needed to survive while, in the United States, businesses in the worlds
39

richest economy held out the promise of opportunity, then officers with guns arrest those
who come in hope.87 Mexicos former president thus summarized well North Americas
daily tragedy and reiterated the urgent need for future governments to do better.
MEXICO COURTS ITS DIASPORA

President Foxs strategy towards the United States sought also to reincorporate into the
repertoire of Mexican diplomacy yet another element used by President Salinas: special
attention to the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Salinas created a substantial
program to provide services to Mexican communities outside Mexico as part of his
lobbying strategy to get the U.S. Congress to approve NAFTA. Fox created an additional
array of institutions to foster relations with the diaspora: the Institute for Mexicans Abroad
(Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, IME), the National Council for the Mexican
Communities Abroad (Consejo Nacional para las Comunidades Mexicanas en el Exterior,
CNCME), which is a task force of 11 Cabinet members to ensure policy coordination
towards the Mexican community abroad, and the Advisory Board to IME (Consejo
Consultivo del Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, CCIME).
At the start of his administration, Fox created an office in Los Pinos to nurture relations
with the diaspora. However, the lack of coordination between this office and the network of
51 Mexican consulates in the United States88 forced him to close the office and combine the
IME with the program that Salinas created. The Foreign Relations Ministry hosted the IME
with its significant portfolio of educational and health prevention projects. As chairman of
the IME, Fox appointed a migrant from Oaxaca who had been living in Santa Rosa,
California, Candido Morales, and as IME executive director, Carlos Gonzlez, a career
diplomat. The IME called upon the Mexican community in the United States to elect an
Advisory Board (CCIME), composed of 120 elected community leaders, to serve three-year
terms. The IMEs budget allows the board to meet twice a year, generally in Mexico City.
The Mexican government thus fostered the construction of a nationally representative and
legitimate diaspora organization in the United States.
President Caldern continued these policies toward the diaspora. The CCIME developed as
an organization. Two years after its creation, it played an important role in securing the
Mexican constitutional amendment that would allow absentee voting. In response to the
growing U.S. anti-immigration sentiment, various Board members became active in
countering criticism of immigration. Moreover, a number of CCIME members created a
coalition, inspired by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, to fight against attacks on
Mexico and Mexican-origin immigrants to the United States.89
The ultimate goal of this Mexican diplomatic approach towards its diaspora remains the
creation of an ethnic lobby. It is hard to tell whether Mexicans in the United States will
have the economic strength, political stature, and will to lobby on behalf of Mexico,
however. Nevertheless, the new organizations created by Fox and continued under
Caldern, retained privileged access to Mexican officials, including the president and
members of Congress.

40

From the diasporas perspective, the pattern is more complex. Mexican-origin peoples in
the United States had long built their own community organizations, many of which had
been transnational in design and purpose. Some of these organizations saw the Mexican
governments efforts as attempts to limit diasporic autonomy and ensnare their
organizations in clientelist and corporatist practices long typical of the Mexican state.
Nevertheless, the new relationship between the Mexican state and some Mexican diasporic
organizations did gain influence for the latter, as just noted regarding absentee balloting.
Relations with Mexican state and local authorities also stimulated a nascent trend toward
sending financial remittances not just to help friends and family but also as donations for
TABLE 8.11 Mexican-born and Mexican-origin Population in the United States, 1910
2006
Year Mexican-origin
Mexican-origin
Mexican-born
Mexican-born
population in U.S. population as % of population in U.S. population as % of total
(thousands)
total
U.S. (thousands)
Mexican-origin
population
population in U.S.
2006 28,396

9.5

11,535

30.8

1996 18,039

6.8

6,679

37

1990 13,393

5.4

4,298

32.1

1980 8,740

3.9

2,199

25.2

1970 4,532

2.2

759

16.7

1960 1,736

576

33.2

1950 1,346

0.9

454

33.7

1940 1,077

0.8

377

35

1930 1,423

1.2

617

43.4

1920 740

0.7

486

65.7

1910 385

0.4

222

57.7

Source: Pew Hispanic Center, Statistical Portrait of the Foreign Born in the United States,
2006.
community projects in Mexico, thereby winning influence over the allocation of resources
in Mexican states and municipalities.90
The size of the Mexican diaspora in the United States was very large. The U.S. census in
2000 recorded 9,177,485 foreign-born Mexican-origin persons in the United States, of
whom 2,061,790 had become naturalized U.S. citizens. 91 Table 8.11 shows how the size of
41

the diaspora has grown over time and continued to do so during the first decade of the
twenty-first century, notwithstanding the restrictive policies that were implemented in the
1990s and 2000s.
CONCLUSION

At the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Mexico and the United States
had discovered yet again that changes beyond the control of their governments had decisive
impacts on their relations. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the transnational
process involving drug traffic and unauthorized international migration changed the
bilateral agenda of the two governments during the centurys first decade. Their
governments felt compelled to respond.
The actions of governments mattered, to be sure. The choice of the Bush administration to
go to war in Iraq transformed U.S. relations with most other governments, including
Mexicos. Mexico chose to place the migration issue on the agenda of its diplomatic
negotiations with the United States, and the Bush administration subsequently launched a
unilateral effort to change U.S. immigration policy. The endeavors of both governments in
war and migration failed. The most impressive and effective governmental actions in
bilateral relations had been inherited from the 1990s, however: NAFTA institutions worked
well to address and solve bilateral trade disputes following their routine, technical
procedures.
External shocks and governmental design changed the structure of the international system
at the start of the century. Fortunately for U.S.Mexican relations, NAFTA institutions held
up, fostering a massive increase in bilateral trade and helping both countries to cope with
the disputes that are a normal side effect of such trade growth. Unfortunately for bilateral
relations, the refocus of the U.S. government on its response to international terrorism and
its decision to go to war in Iraq securitized many aspects of bilateral U.S.Mexican
relations (including migration and, less so, trade) and made cooperation over immigration
more difficult.
As the United States inaugurated a new president on January 20, 2009, the two countries
faced clear challenges. During the preceding decade, the effect of organized drug traffic
crime had worsened and the pool of unauthorized Mexican migrants in the United States
and the number of Mexicans who died upon attempting to cross the border had grown. This
remained the bilateral agenda that was being carried forward. The bilateral security
institutions built in the 1990s had atrophied and new ones had to be developed to cope with
these increasingly serious issues. Fortunately, bilateral trade and investment had grown and
NAFTAs problem-solving institutions had succeeded. Mexicos democratic institutions had
also responded with effectiveness and responsibility as they faced the new foreign policy
challenges. Mexico and the United States worked most effectively in the past when they
jointly built bilateral institutions. They had no choice but to face up to their shared North
American future together.

42

43