Mexico & Nafta - 12 October 2004

A raft of recently published statistics show that Mexico is in danger of losing even more of its brightest and best young people to the US. One statistic showed that 89% of all science students with scholarships provided by the Mexican government to study in the US did not come home. Furthermore, 30% of all Mexican PhDs now live in the US.

There is more than anecdotal evidence to suggest that the brain drain has picked up. US Census numbers show that between 1995 and 2002, the number of foreign-born Mexicans earning between US$50,000 and US$75,000 in the US increased nearly 10-fold. The Census also showed that the number of Mexican-born people who were earning over US$75,000 increased 12-fold in the same period.

It is not only right at the top of the income scale that Mexicans are moving to the US. We have noted on several occasions that studies of undocumented Mexican migrants to the US show that they tend to be better educated than the average Mexican, at least in terms of years of completed schooling. A recent article in World Policy Journal by Christian Stracke showed that at least 1.2m Mexican migrants to the US had completed some education after high school. As Mexico has only 5.2m people with any post-school qualifications, the figure means that 20% of its stock of highly-trained people prefer to live in the US.

• The US Border Patrol reported that in the first 11 months of its fiscal year 165 people had died in trying to cross the border from Mexico to Arizona. The US Border Patrol's fiscal year runs from October to September. In 2003, the Border Patrol picked up 151 bodies. The most dangerous area is around Yuma, on the Arizona side. So far this year the Border Patrol has picked up 27 bodies compared with 15 last year. The Border Patrol claims that the death toll would have been even higher without the measures it had put in place to prevent would-be migrants dying of thirst. 
• The House of Representatives voted on 14 September to accept ID cards issued by the Mexican consulates in the US as proof of identity for financial transactions. The vote was 222 to 117. The move was strongly backed by Hispanic members of congress and local police forces who said that it would be helpful in the struggle against terrorism. The vote is a setback for Tom Tancredo, the Californian Republican congressman, who is vehemently opposed to improving the rights and status of migrants from Latin America. He wanted to neuter the proposal by refusing to allow federal money to be spent on making it work. Other opponents argued that there were not enough checks by consular officials on those people to whom they were issuing cards. The backers of the proposal argued that it would be much better for US security if people sending money back to Latin America could use the financial system. Latin Americans are reckoned to earn and spend US$400bn in the US each year. The idea of the proposal is to prevent this money being handled by criminal money launderers.
• The governors of Mexico's 32 states asked the federal government to protest against moves in California to restrict the rights of Mexican residents to benefits and driving licences. The populist policy is being led by the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The driving force behind the Mexican protest was Amalia Garcí­a, the newly elected governor of Zacatecas; the state is a huge source of labour for the US. Garcí­a, a former national president of the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática, is responsible for immigration issues at the governors' forum; the Conferencia Nacional de Gobernadores (Conago).The governors say that that the Californian decision is discriminatory and seriously harms Mexicans.