THE MIGRATION CRISIS AND WHAT MEXICO CAN REALLY DO

Yesterday, President Biden spoke on the phone with the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to agree on stricter measures that will help reduce the uncontrolled flow of migrants that cross the border between Mexico and Guatemala, move through Mexican territory and reach the border with the United States.

Tens of thousands of migrants enter Mexico every month, whose goal is not to stay in the country, but to head for the United States.
Since the Donald Trump administration, the López Obrador government has pledged to use the National Guard to try to stop this flow of migrants. Currently, of the 120,000 members of the National Guard, 32,000 are dedicated to stopping undocumented migration, both on the border with Guatemala and in the center and north of the country.

However, both the Central American and Mexican non-governmental organizations that support such migration, and the criminal organizations that benefit from it, have changed their strategy. Instead of bringing migrants into Mexico illegally, they prefer to do so legally, through asylum applications, which in 2023 alone reached 136,934, an increase of 30% compared to 2022.

The spokesman of the National Security Council of the United States, John Kirby, said at a press conference that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the adviser to the president, Liz Sherwood Randall, will travel to Mexico in these days to agree with President López Obrador new measures to stop the flow of migrants, such as more checkpoints on railways and roads and a greater involvement of the Mexican armed forces in immigration control.

President Biden is under a lot of pressure from the immigration crisis, as Republicans are gaining sympathy among the US electorate by highlighting the Biden administration’s “failed” strategy to stop the tide of illegal migrants entering the country, and this is leading to further disorder in how the crisis is managed.

For example, Texas Governor Greg Abbot, with the support of the state legislature, enacted a new law to allow state security agencies to detain and deport migrants, which is clearly the exclusive power of the federal government.

On the other hand, the Biden government has closed two railroad crossings (at El Paso and Eagle Pass), to slow down the flow of migration to the United States, which has caused losses to American and Mexican businessmen amounting to $400 million.

Surely López Obrador’s government will comply with all the “recommendations” made to it by President Biden’s envoys, and that will not stop the flow of migrants to the United States.
It is not going to be Mexico that will solve the immigration problem for the United States.

The US political and economic elites must decide once and for all what they want on the issue of migration.

And there are only two possibilities:

One possibility is that they define that migrants are needed to make the U. S. economy more competitive in its strategic competition with China. If this is the case, then a regulatory framework must be created to allow such migration, in the forms and quantities that the U. S. economy needs. And once that is achieved, establish strict control and an expedited process of deportation of all people who have not applied and legally entered U. S. soil.

The second option is to define that the US labour market is already saturated and that only a very limited number of asylum-seekers can be accepted. If this is so, then the U. S. must send a clear and unequivocal message to the world that it will not accept any more migrants on its territory for any reason or circumstance and that it will ruthlessly expel them once they enter the country illegally.

If the US elites cannot clearly define what they want regard to migration, then this crisis will not only continue, but deepen. And you can rest assured that Mexico is not going to solve the US migration problem.