Mexico: Too Big to Fail

Here are my views on President Obama’s trip to Mexico and the relation to immigration reform (from Huffington Post):

As President Obama visits Mexico to discuss, among other things, U.S. immigration reform, it’s too bad that members of Congress who are involved in drafting legislation have left out a key ingredient to addressing undocumented immigration from Mexico: investing in Mexico in order to create jobs and ease the need for migrants to cross the border to seek employment. Apparently, the Obama Administration gets this. Ben Rhodes, an Obama deputy national security adviser, has acknowledged, “If the Mexican economy is growing, it forestalls the need for people to migrate to the United States to find work.”

The fact that the Congress and the White House are tackling comprehensive immigration reform is good news for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and their supporters. However, if the package does not include at least the first steps toward helping Mexico improve its economy and infrastructure, undocumented Mexican migration will not be solved permanently. Read more...

bh