U.S.-Mexico: Next Door Neighbors, Worlds Apart
by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON - It remains an indelible memory from my 20 years as an American living and working in Mexico. Visiting a school I helped build in the town of Charcas, in the central state of San Luis Potosi where I operated a manganese mine, I was startled to see a map showing Mexico's borders stretching across the American West.

"Señor Weiss," a young girl asked, "why did you steal half our country?" She was referring to the northern half of Mexico lost to the United States in the war of 1846-48. "Just be patient," I half joked. "You'll get it all back."

The divisive debate over illegal immigration to the United States is more than just another chapter in America's long love-hate relationship with immigrants. When virtually 100 percent of the rhetoric focuses on the estimated 50 percent of illegal immigrants who come from Mexico, it's a tragic flare-up between two old neighbors whose historic insecuri-ties make reasoned compromise all the more difficult.

American xenophobes seize on recent immigration rallies as proof that 170 years after Mexico sacked the Alamo, America's "Anglo-Saxon identity" is still under siege. Hearing a few protestors chanting, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” these latter-day American Know-Nothings warn that Mexicans still covet the western U.S. and are patiently getting it all back through a demographic reconquista.

To many Mexicans, America's rush to defend the border - with Minuteman vigilantes, a new 700- mile high-tech fence (el muro de la verguenza, "the wall of shame," the Mexicans call it) and thousands of National Guard troops - validates old strains of anti-Americanism. It's seen as the latest example of America's historic disregard for Mexican sovereignty, dating back to the 1914 landing of U.S. forces at Veracruz and the 1916 invasion to pursue the revolutionary bandit, Francisco "Pancho" Villa.

Election year politics in both countries exploit these historic insecurities. In the United States, you know things have turned ugly when President George W. Bush has to explain that rounding up and deporting millions of people "is neither wise, nor realistic."

In Mexico, Washington's "militarization" of the border has candidates competing in their outrage. Seeking to regain his lead in the polls, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City, blasts President Vicente Fox and his conservative party candidate, Felipe Calderón, for not standing up against "a very serious aggression against a sovereign nation."

In the "Mexicanization of America," Hispanics have surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority group. They are expected to make California the first Hispanic-majority state by 2035 and to comprise a third of the U.S. population by 2050.

The "Americanization of Mexico," in contrast, is fueled by goods, not people. Thanks to NAFTA, Mexican culture is awash in "Made in America." Some 40 percent of Mexicans are employed by U.S. companies - including Wal-Mart, now Mexico's largest employer.

Washington and Mexico City should see illegal immigra- tion as the supply and demand problem it is. Mexico supplies millions of citizens for which it cannot provide well-paying jobs. A growing American economy demands workers and offers low-skill wages ten times higher than in Mexico.

On the demand side, Americans should remember that a temporary-work program is nothing new. Between 1942 and 1964, the United States allowed some 5 million Mexican braceros (men who worked with their arms, brazos) to work legally on American farms and ranches, take their wages home to Mexico during the winter, and return the following season. The program was eventually killed - not because of harm to American workers, but because of physical and financial exploitation of the braceros.

On the supply side, Mexico must create the well-paying jobs that give its people a reason to stay. This means shaking off, once and for all, the last remnants of its protectionist past with constitutional, labor and tax reforms that would attract greater foreign investment, especially to its state-run oil monopoly.

Americans and Mexicans can harp on ancient history or they can recognize their common responsibility to change the underlying economic forces driving illegal immigration. Until that happens, Mexicans will keep trying to cross to el otro lado, the other side. And as recent history teaches, with a tragic wall in Berlin, there is no barrier big enough and no border force strong enough to hold back the desperate.