Immigration and Human Rights: The New Bilateral Relationship and Immigration Reform
Contributed by Doug Tanoury, Mérida
Immigration and Human Rights: The New Bilateral Relationship and Immigration Reform
By Laura Carlsen
The election of Barack Obama has changed the playing field for U.S.-Mexico relations, and especially when it comes to immigration. Immigration didn't turn out to be the hot topic in the presidential campaigns some people predicted it would be. The right had hoped to use it as a wedge issue to promote its agenda and take out liberals, but with the candidacy of John McCain who had supported immigration reform, and the advent of the economic crisis, the issue didn't receive much attention in the end. Immigration came up most often in the democratic primaries and both Obama and Hillary Clinton supported a form of legalization, as Obama said, to bring the country's 12 million undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows."
The current situation offers the opportunity to work toward a much more integrated and healthy bilateral agenda. Obama's emphasis on domestic policy to reactivate the economy inevitably must include a rethinking of the relationship with Mexico due to the high degree of integration. This explains his insistence on NAFTA renegotiation. U.S. media has frequently pointed out the similarities with the Franklin Roosevelt era. When FDR developed the New Deal to cope with the Great Depression, he did not abandon external relations. Instead he constructed the Good Neighbor policy based on many of the same principles of solidarity that the New Deal relied on. In the Depression era, the lack of resources due to the economic crisis supported the new policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs.
Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen@ciponline.org) is Director of the Americas Policy Program
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