For more than a century Mexicans were migrants, crossing the border to make a few bucks and return home. Now this pattern of “circularity” has ended, says Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico and frequent NEWSWEEK contributor. Tightening border controls and immigration rules has backfired, he says, both failing to slow the flow of several hundred thousand Mexicans into the United States each year and making those who come afraid to venture the trip home. The result is that migrant workers have become immigrant settlers. From 1920 to 1970 the Mexican population in the United States held steady at well under a million, before spiking to 2.2 million in 1980 and 11 million now, or six times more than the second largest immigrant population (the Chinese).
Castañeda uses the shift from migrant to immigrant to explain the growing “crisis” in U.S.-Mexican relations, and the special vitriol of the immigration debate that now roils the U.S. presidential campaign. More than 11 percent of the Mexican population now lives in the United States, and more than half say they would come if they could. As their numbers in the United States boom, many are now pushing to settle in rural areas and small towns, where outsiders are more of a shock than in cities. In part because of sheer numbers, Mexicans can live in the United States much as they would at home, speaking Spanish, buying Mexican goods, assimilating less than other immigrant groups and therefore provoking a louder backlash.
Neither side has fully recognized the new reality. The United States has effectively become the 33rd state of Mexico. The Mexican economy in the United States is now, by some estimates, as large as the Mexican economy in Mexico. The amount of cash Mexicans in the United States send home each year has grown from $3.5 billion in 1996 to $23 billion in 2006. Yet for decades, Mexico maintained what Castañeda calls an ostrich policy on the people it saw as a useful embarrassment. The Roman Catholic hierarchy once dismissed migrants as traitors, while the Mexican government—happy to keep the economic safety valve open—insisted as a matter of “unmovable dogma” that it had no ability to slow migration.
Now that’s changing, as Mexico works to normalize the lives of its countrymen in the United States. In 1998 Mexico created a right to dual nationality, officially rejecting the “traitor” stigma. In 2001 it issued a new consular ID card, or matrícula, mainly to give undocumented aliens in the United States a document, and began lobbying U.S. institutions to accept it. Thirteen states now recognize the matrícula for driver’s license applications, and hundreds of banks accept it, advancing a tacit policy of “creeping legalization.” To further the cause, Mexico in 2003 created the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, which Castañeda suggests was “actively involved” in the demonstrations against draconian immigration “reform.” Back home, there were no sympathy protests, a sign of lingering resentment against those who leave.
The United States has been even slower to adapt to the end of circularity, and may not have to. The flow of Mexicans looks likely to slow in 10 to 15 years (when their numbers in the U.S. reach about 20 million), as economic growth and slowing population growth open up jobs at home. Castañeda argues that, nonetheless, Mexicans in particular should keep pushing for a grand immigration deal that offers a path to legalization for Mexicans in America, and restores circularity by creating some form of temporary-worker program. To achieve that, he argues, Mexico needs to address America’s understandable but exaggerated fear of terrorists slipping over the border, and create incentives and punishments to make sure Mexicans go to America through legal channels, then return home.
It’s a point America’s presidential candidates should also consider closely: higher walls are keeping Mexicans in, not out. And the answer is to find a legal way for them to come, and go.
