FINANCIAL TIMES Column: … Consider this: Mexico is fast turning into America’s most important trading partner – and is already its second-largest export market. Yet the only context in which the country is mentioned on the campaign trail is drugs or illegal immigration. It is rare that reality and politics so sharply diverge.
Here is Uncle Sam’s Latin American reality. First, Mexico is rapidly becoming as important to the US economy as China. There has been much excitement in recent months about the possibility of “reshoring” manufacturing jobs from China to America. If you broaden the destination to North America, the trend is already under way. Mexico is now vying with China as the manufacturing hub of choice for US and other multinational companies – it is as economically integrated with the US as any two members of the eurozone are to each other….
As a result of their country’s manufacturing boom, Mexicans are no longer quite so hungry to work on US construction sites or pick fruit in California and Florida. Contrary to what the US election debate would imply, illegal immigration to the US has been in reverse for several years. Ten years ago, roughly 800,000 Mexicans crossed the border every year to the US, mostly illegally. Today the flow is the other way. The greatest peaceful emigration in the history of immigrants is over. Neither Mr Obama nor Mr Romney appears to have received that memo, although the president has assisted the trend by deporting almost 1.5m illegal immigrants – more than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined… (more)
EDITOR: This is an informative article and we recommend reading it in its entirety.
