by José de la Isla
HOUSTON, Texas – In March, President Obama signed a bill that, among other things, ended a pilot program that allowed some Mexican cargo trucks to travel on U.S. highways. Mexico responded quickly with retaliatory tariffs on 89 agricultural and industrial products from 40 states, affecting about $2.4 billion worth of goods and tens of thousands of jobs.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican trucks were to have unrestricted highway passage in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas in the beginning and later all highways. Roadblocks, however, of one kind or another have been imposed since 1995 and the Clinton administration. By October 2008, a Department of Transportation study pilot program found Mexican trucks were safer, in some cases, than U.S. trucks. But some U.S. special interests succeeded in pressuring to keep the 15-year foot-dragging going.
Obstructionism is beneath us, of course. But the recession and the retaliatory tariffs have set off an alarm we cannot ignore. A plan appears to be in the works and is undergoing review, according to the Washington Times, for Congress to act and allow Mexican trucks onto U.S. highways.
But there’s more to it than that. It runs deeper.
As the United States pulls slowly and painfully out of this recession, the realization is coming that we overextended our commitments and treasury for dubious purposes. Too often we tried to buy solutions instead of investing in answers. Our 2009 $1.75 trillion deficit tells us we just don’t have the kind of money anymore, for example, to maintain 865 military facilities in 40 countries and U.S. territories.
We do it, retired policy expert Prof. Chalmers Johnson reminds us, and we get nothing in return. Instead, many things we ought to be paying attention to get neglected.
For instance, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says we need 4,000 new officers and $4 billion in infrastructure and technology improvements for maintaining secure and efficient inland ports of entry.
These directly affect our security and trade.
It might take a while for public attitudes to warm up to the fact that we are increasingly perceived abroad as part of a North American community and not standing alone. For example, some Indian firms are looking to boost their operations in Mexico to serve both Latin America and the United States, especially in the event of new visa restrictions on foreign workers that Mexican IT workers are less subject to.
In another sector, the United States could adopt Canada’s guest-worker formula to avoid our annual farmworker shortage.
How to work together should not have us in a quandary. North American advanced higher-education institutions all should operate with some active collaboration involving a sister college or university in Canada or Mexico.
Take for instance what two Mexican students, Layda Negrete and Roberto Hernández, did while each worked on their doctorates at the Goldman Public Policy
School at UC Berkeley, Examining Mexico’s justice system, Layda prepared a conventional, dry public-policy briefing presentation showing 80 percent of defendants in that country were tried and convicted in court without ever seeing a lawyer. She was hooted by the incredulous audience.
But after she and Roberto teamed up to tell the same story in a 20-minute documentary, political channels took note. The issue soon became part of a national debate.
Eventually, in 2008, an amendment was made to the Mexican Constitution to include
due process rights and presumption of innocence of defendants.
A full-length film by the pair about one of their cases recently debuted in Amsterdam.
“The film is our policy memo,” Roberto says.
Unless we increase norms for civic, political and economic exchanges to influence each other’s countries, how else does change happen?
No matter how we try to make it seem, our economic situation is awakening us to the fact that the North American nations are intertwined in ways we have been reluctant to acknowledge, including driving delivery trucks. Hispanic Link News Service
[José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service.]
