Effusive about Mexico’s future

President Obama “put on his cheerleader skirt and shook his pom-poms” for Team Mexico last week, said Denise Dresser in El Norte. Gushing about this country’s charms, people, and economic potential during his visit here, Obama was “an emissary of optimism.” He made a case for a new, improved Mexico, brimming with opportunity, and he did it far better than President Enrique Peña Nieto ever has in his five months in office. But as much as Obama’s speech flattered Mexicans, its real audience was north of the border. The “cartwheels and headstands,” the “shouts of Viva Peña Nieto!” were intended to make Americans forget about the failed drug war that has littered Mexico with corpses and corrupted its police. Obama is desperate for a success on reforming immigration, particularly since his gun-control legislation failed to pass. If the American people—and their representatives in Congress—are to accept immigration reform, “Mexico cannot be seen as a poor, violent, unstable land teeming with millions of migrants eager to cross the border.”

Yet Obama’s praise was sincere, said Ricardo Raphael in El Universal. He really does recognize that, as he said, “a new Mexico is emerging,” one that is “creating a new prosperity.” That’s not propaganda; it’s simple fact. Most economic analysts predict that Mexico will be one of the world’s 10 biggest economies by 2050—Goldman Sachs actually has us pegged to hit the No. 5 spot, currently held by France. So it’s not surprising that Obama would want to shift the bilateral dialogue from security and the drug war—the topics that dominated the two terms of Felipe Calderón—to trade and investment.

The problem is that all the high-toned discussion of trade and economic promise overlooked the plight of actual Mexicans in the U.S., said Jorge Durand in La Jornada. Since Obama was elected president, almost 2 million Mexicans have been deported. Our people, in fact, are deported at a much higher rate than other nationalities. Such “racial profiling” is demeaning, unfair, and “unworthy of the first black president of the United States.” Obama’s zeal for booting out Mexicans has broken up countless families and led to a new civic group in the U.S., the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, whose slogan is “Obama, don’t deport my mama.”

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Even if Obama ignores these activists, said Isidro H. Cisneros in La Crónica de Hoy, the next president won’t be able to. The 30 million Mexicans living in the U.S. make up nearly 10 percent of the population, and even though about one quarter of them are undocumented, they are “growing in political influence.” The U.S. should realize that if immigration reform doesn’t get dealt with now, it is bound to become an even more pressing “political imperative” in the years to come.