Monday, November 13, 2006
Will Calderon Also Be Obsessed With Mexican Emigration?
By Allan Wall
Will Felipe Calderon, scheduled to become Mexico’s
president on December 1st, be as obsessed with emigration as President Vicente Fox has been for six years?
Fox was obsessed with the emigration question and
allowed it to gobble up valuable time and political capital, which would have been better spent improving Mexico’s
economy rather than figuring out how to get more Mexicans out of Mexico.
Felipe Calderon has already been talking a lot about
emigration, and in that respect he seems to be following the Fox game plan. On
the other hand, Calderon has indicated that migration will not be the “central axis” of U.S.-Mexican relations.
The recent U.S. congressional elections open the
possibility that President George W. Bush and a Democratic Congress will be able to give amnesty to illegal aliens and increase
legal immigration. Yet the 2006 congressional election was not really a referendum
on immigration, but a rejection of Republican incompetence.
It’s significant that no winning congressional
candidate campaigned on a pro-amnesty platform. The 2008 primary season is less
than two years away, and things could change once again.
By investing so much capital on the immigration
question, a Mexican president is staking his future on a question that can be reversed by the U.S. electorate.
However from the Mexican perspective a more basic
question remains. Regardless of what U.S. politicians might do about immigration policy, is the continuance of mass emigration
in the long-term economic and social interests of Mexico?
Certainly emigration generates a lot of money
for Mexico in remittances. In fact, remittance money may soon surpass oil revenue
as Mexico’s largest legal source of income.
Emigration also provides Mexico’s leaders
with a safety valve. As long as Mexican governments (of whatever party) can keep
Mexicans crossing the border it will relieve pressure on the Mexican government.
And that, alas, is part of the problem. What
incentives do Mexico’s leaders have to reform the Mexican economy as long as the emigration safety valve looms so large?
What about those remittances? Mexico is now the world’s biggest source of emigration (the largest exporter of human beings), and
the 3rd largest recipient (after China and India) of remittance money.
Remittances do provide a social safety net. But
as motors of economic development, remittances are not too effective say several experts.
For example, Alfonso Sandoval, spokesman for
the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), says that remittances are not incentives for productive development in the Mexican
regions that receive them. And none other than Mexican central bank chief Guillermo
Ortiz said something quite similar, that remittances provide a social safety net but are not a key lubricant of the Mexican
economy (Mexican Central Banker Ortiz Speaks His Mind, by Allan Wall, October 2. 2006).
For a concrete example, consider Felipe Calderon’s
home state of Michoacan.
Of all Mexican states, Michoacan has the highest
dependency on remittances, with one out of ten households receiving them. Now
if the remittances-are-great theory were correct, wouldn’t Michoacan be booming?
On the contrary, it is one of Mexico’s least developed states and continues to expel large amounts of emigrants.
The same is true of other states with high remittance-dependency, such as Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Durango.
Rather than solving Mexico’s problems, remittances
just perpetuate the viciousness of underdevelopment and encourage more Mexicans to emigrate.
If Calderon wants real economic development he needs to move Mexico away from its heroin-like addiction to remittances.
And there are plenty of areas to improve.
As a former energy secretary Calderon knows what
a mess PEMEX (Mexico’s oil monopoly) is in. Politically, any sort of privatization
or even semi-privatization would unleash a firestorm of protest, but something has to be done.
Mexico’s enormous informal economy is in reality
an economic resource, and ways should be found to legalize it and bring it into the formal economy.
Taxation must be made more efficient, as estimates
put Mexican tax evasion at 40 percent.
Calderon could work to achieve a real federalism,
in which Mexican states have more leeway in managing their own revenues, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to the economy.
These are just a few of the areas that
Calderon and the new Mexican Congress can concentrate on to improve Mexico’s economy. It would be much better than the
tired and counter-productive remedy of sending more and more Mexicans northward.
Allan Wall, a MexiData.info columnist, recently
returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He currently resides in Mexico, where he
has lived since 1991. He can be reached
via e-mail at allan39@prodigy.net.mx.
