[I hate to sound like a naif, but some of this stuff about infrastructure and immigration sounds aggressively progressive. Maybe Roberto Unger wasn't completely full of it?]
Financial Times ; 07-Jul-2000
Fox lays Mexican hopes at the neighbour's door
PRESIDENT-ELECT'S GOALS: CLOSER INTEGRATION WITH THE US DRIVES ECONOMIC VISION
By RICHARD LAPPER
Not surprisingly for a man who was once head of Coca-Cola in Mexico, Vicente Fox has lost little time in marketing his "big idea": a fundamental reshaping of his country's relationship with the United States.
Since his startling victory over the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Sunday's presidential election, Mr Fox has made clear that the maintenance of economic stability is his principal short-term goal.
But his long-term term vision for Mexico looks likely to depend on building closer and deeper links with its northern neighbour and biggest trading partner.
"We are neighbours and partners and in the end we have to arrive at the same level of development," he says.
Mr Fox believes that closer integration with the US and Canada - including a more open regional labour market - is the best way to reduce the difference between standards of living. GDP per head in Mexico is estimated at just Dollars 5,320, less than a seventh of the average in the US and under a quarter of the Canadian figure.
The model he presents is the European Union. Mr Fox points to the way that more open migration and heavy spending by the EU on infrastructure allowed Europe's poorer countries - Spain, Portugal and Greece - to develop at a rapid pace in the 1980s and 1990s.
He says Mexico can best develop by forging a similar union with its two partners in the North American Trade Agreement that came into effect six years ago.
"The EU is the way forward. It succeeded in its object," he argues.
Mr Fox's policy seems to be asking an awful lot of the US and Canada. For example, Mexico might seek three times more visas from the US, allowing it to increase legal emigration from 70,000-75,000 per year to more than 200,000.
Mr Fox aims to increase private investment from around Dollars 12bn a year to Dollars 20bn. But he will also try to persuade the US and Canada to provide billions of dollars in public funding for new Mexican roads and bridges and for social spending.
His advisers argue that these policies recognise existing realities and would benefit both the US and Canada.
The extra visas would simply reverse the proportions of legal and illegal migration because, along with the legal emigrants, 280,000 Mexicans emigrate illegally each year.
Most emigrants find jobs, indicating that there is genuine demand for their labour. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has said on a number of occasions recently that the US economy needs to import new labour.
In return, Mexico would promise to take more action to restrict illegals crossing the border.
Mr Jorge Castaneda, a leftwing academic and an adviser to Mr Fox's campaign, says the government could seek to reduce the flow of would-be migrants through "choke points". Discounted fares on flights taking Mexicans to border towns such as Tijuana could be discouraged, for example.
Infrastructure spending would promote development and expand the size of the internal Mexican market, bringing long-term benefits to US and Canadian companies. Mr Castaneda concedes that the scale of the funding needed could be vast - even in the early 1990s government officials were talking of Dollars 10bn annually over a 15-year period - but he says that there is no alternative.
"The idea of the private sector building up infrastructure doesn't work. Either the US and Canada are going to do it or it will never be done," he says.
Toll roads built by the private sector in the early 1990s are generally too expensive for most Mexicans and have left the construction industry with heavy debts. Social spending could save money.
"It is cheaper to pay for a child's education in Oaxaca than to educate a child from Oaxaca in Los Angeles," says Mr Castaneda.
A new approach on drugs policy might also be more effective in limiting flows.
Mr Castaneda says that Mexico will lobby the US administration and congressmen for the repeal of the "certification" process, whereby legislators annually declare whether countries are eligible to receive aid on the basis of their anti-drugs efforts.
"The (existing) policy," says Mr Castaneda, "poisons US-Mexican relations every 12 months and there is no good reason for it to be there." Mexico would support efforts to develop a genuinely multilateral policy, which would involve countries involved in drugs production, trafficking and consumption.
Critics say the agenda amounts to a very tall order. For example, Sergio Munoz Bata, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, says there is fierce opposition to illegal migration in many US border states.
"It would be dangerously wrong to conclude that the US wants to revise Nafta and negotiate a new deal on migration." Mr Fox and his advisers, however, take heart from the thought that US congressmen are more likely to look favourably on Mexico now it is a democracy. "There may be a little democracy windfall," says Mr Castaneda. He believes that only a lack of imagination had stopped previous Mexican governments from taking this radical approach. Mr Zedillo didn't believe in this type of approach, he says.
"He thought it amounted to a kind of globophobia."
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