What Immigration and Border Security Mean to U.S.-Mexico Relations

Supply chains, trade, immigration and labor are among the hot topics of this years’ U.S. presidential election, and a new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, will begin her six-year term in October. The next four years and beyond will be a telling time for U.S.-Mexico relations.

Nearshoring already is having an impact, as companies seek to diversify their supply chains to be less dependent on China: In 2023, Mexican imports to the U.S. were greater than those of China.

“While border security has dominated the presidential candidates’ rhetoric so far, the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico is multidimensional and complex,” said David Damore, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, during Brookings’ webinar/event, “U.S.-Mexico Relations: Addressing Challenges at the Border.”

More honest, tough talk about shared border issues is needed, said Vanda Felbab Brown, senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in Brookings’ foreign policy program, in answer to a question about policies that panelists felt the next U.S. president should implement.

Topics should include contraband and rules of law, she said, as well as “the presence of self-style militias along the U.S.-Mexico border that can have potentially significant and negative effect on the quality of our elections.

John Tumin, Ph.D., executive associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where the event was held, called for restarting negotiations with Congress on immigration reform, “as difficult and challenging as this might be,” he added.

“I think that the bilateral relationship in between the U.S. and Mexico, while very complex in many ways, sometimes gets derailed around immigration,” he said. Given that the U.S. has a large population of Latino descent and a large contingent in the DACA program, “this is a tremendously important issue for Mexico,” he said. In the U.S., progress around identity, for example, might spur other changes and priorities for the U.S.-Mexico relationship, he said.

The U.S. president, however, has limited power in terms of long-term reform or change in relation to immigration policy, said Rachel Torres, assistant professor of political science at UNLV. “So, that's kind of been the problem reoccurring across administrations,” she said.

“Congressional gridlock, as well as just general partisan divide on how we should go about reforming immigration, is going to create the system where when a presidential administration comes in, it may pass, for example, executive order to reshape immigration and the next administration comes in and undoes that.”

Her idea of a policy to undertake? Something similar to the 2001 Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act that set up pathways to citizenship.

In addition to engaging in talks about immigration policy reform and shared border issues, the U.S. also must define what it means by immigration and border security, said Mike Kagan, director of the Immigration Clinic at UNLV. “You can have a sports stadium that lets a huge crowd in that is secure,” he said. “You can also have security by being closed. (The term secure) is very ambiguous.”

Other considerations for the U.S. in thinking about future policies, panelists said, include:

• Do we have a need for immigrant labor? And in what industries?
• Do immigrants make an economic contribution to the U.S. economy?
• Why is the immigrant population growing?
• What do we want from immigration?

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Bill Oxford)