The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

This is not to say that Mexico’s next president will encourage his compatriots to head north en masse. But the realities of labor markets in the U.S. andMexico, combined with the inability of the Mexican execu- tive and legislature to work together to address the obstacles to competi- tiveness (e.g., an inefficient energy sector, an obstructive bureaucracy and a flawed justice system), thereby fostering job creation in Mexico, will ensure that illegal immigration is an issue that won’t go away. So protecting the rights of Mexicans trying to get into or living illegally in the U.S. will remain politically popular. It should certainly be possible to negotiate trade-offs between the U.S. interest in tightening security and coop- erating more closely on drug enforcement, and the Mexican interest in protecting the safety and rights of its citizens in the U.S. However, there are major obstacles. Mexico prefers not to treat the different issues as related; worse, most Mexicans do not understand how complicat- ed the process is for the U.S. to change its immigration policy, even when both houses of Congress and the presi- dency are controlled by the same party. That misconcep- tion may help to explain a monumental blunder early in the Fox administration, when Mexico insisted on achiev- ing the “whole enchilada” in immigration-policy negotia- tions. It is not clear that the three main presidential can- didates have learned that lesson, however. All that said, there are certainly significant differences among the three front-runners on foreign policy. For instance, they are likely to place different emphases on relations with Mexico’s southern neighbors, particularly Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Bolivia. And those cal- culations will inevitably affect how closely Mexico wants to identify its interests with those of the U.S. The Candidate of Continuity: Felipe Calderon As recently as last summer, Mexican pollsters assumed that former Interior Minister Santiago Creel, not Felipe Calderon, would be the presidential candidate of the National Action Party, the most conservative of the three main parties. But after President Fox publicly chastised Calderon for using a rally to announce his interest in run- ning for the PAN’s nomination, he resigned as energy minister (a post he had held for eight months) and began distancing himself from Fox. And in a sign of just how much politics has changed in Mexico, that move helped Calderon wrest the nomination from Creel. In spite of that falling out, Mexi- can foreign policy under a Calderon presidency would probably resem- ble that of the Fox administration. There would likely be different faces in the top positions of the Foreign Ministry, but the thrust of policy — a pri- mary focus on the relationship with the U.S. and on efforts to improve it — would continue. That approach will not be tremendously popular in Mexico. In a recent interview, Gabriel Guerra, a well- known analyst and spokesman for former President Ernesto Zedillo, characterized Fox’s attack on Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, and his defense of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (and of Washington), as “the consequence of a series of mistakes, inexperience and no medium- and long-term strategy giving Latin America its rightful place in policy.” Indeed, there is a widespread consensus that while Fox’s tilt toward the U.S. and break with Cuba may have been justifiable, it happened too fast and too soon — and failed to secure a bilateral immigra- tion agreement. Thus, however sincerely Calderon might believe that Mexico should look north, prudence dictates that his stance not be so enthusiastically pro-American. Another incentive to hew closely to the country’s cur- rent foreign policy is the fact that Calderon, whose politi- cal career has focused principally on his party and on the legislature, has little first-hand knowledge of international affairs. Nor has he developed a cadre of foreign-policy experts, even as a significant number of professional diplomats have been forced out of the Foreign Ministry by the present administration. This lack of expertise could introduce unfortunate complications into the bilateral relationship. The Candidate of Change: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador The Democratic Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. (He is gen- erally known as “AMLO,” more or less as many Americans refer to George W. Bush as “W” or “Dubya.”) F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 41 Immigration is the top item on the bilateral agenda for both countries, but for very different reasons.