Mexico & Nafta - January 2009 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 22 December the economy minister, Gerardo Ruiz Mateos, said that it would be “suicide" for Mexico to sign a free trade deal with China.

In Ruiz Mateos's view Mexico is an industrialised country which competes with Chinese companies to sell manufactured goods. Ruiz Mateos, almost dismissively, said that it might be sensible for “predominantly agricultural exporters such as Brazil or Argentina" to sign a FTA with China but it would not be so for Mexico. Peru and Chile are the only two Latin American countries which have FTAs with China, though Costa Rica is considering one.

Ruiz Mateos said an FTA between Mexico and China would be suicide for Mexican industry. He noted that on 19 December he had announced that Mexico would tackle China at the World Trade Organization over China's unfair subsidies of manufactured goods. Ruiz Mateos said that he hoped for a friendly solution but warned that Mexico would not shy away from calling for a disputes' settlement panel if China did not deliver what Mexico wanted.

Ruiz Mateos noted that Chinese investment in Mexico was negligible. He said that the European Union had invested US$12bn in Mexico in 2006, but China had invested just US$70m in the same period. Furthermore, he claimed that this investment was staffed entirely by (400) Chinese, so the investment had produced no jobs for Mexicans.

Mexico exports only about US$1.8bn in goods to China but imports around US$31bn of goods from it. 

Migration: A small poll (522 respondents) published in Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper, on 2 January found that 54% of Mexicans who had emigrated to the US would not consider returning home even though most admitted to finding life tougher in the US. On the other hand 41% said that they would consider returning home because of the economic crisis.

The US is home to around 12m Mexicans. The general assumption is that 6m of these are illegal immigrants. Over 90% of all Mexican migrants live in the US. The poll interviewed Mexicans returning home at various points on the border with the US. A thumping 96% of those polled said that they were only coming home for Christmas (the poll was taken on 21 and 22 December) and only 2% said that they may not return to the US. This is despite the fact that 77% of those polled said that it was much more difficult to find work in the US and expected 2009 to be worse than 2008. Even so, 49% said that they personally were OK and only 46% said that things were going badly for them. The migrants were hopeful that the incoming president, Barack Obama, would come up with a comprehensive immigration reform. A thumping 61% said that they expected such a reform while fewer than a third of those polled (31%) said that a reform was unlikely.

Interestingly, very few migrants found the US racist. Only 4% of those polled said that this was the biggest problem they faced in the US. Most (47%) said that the state of the US economy was their main problem and 28% said that rising unemployment was the biggest problem. Migrants were strongly supportive of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa in Mexico. A staggering 72% though that he was doing a good job and only 9% thought that he was doing badly. The remaining 19% offered no opinion.

• Spain: The Spanish embassy in Mexico reckons that 150,000 Mexicans may opt for Spanish nationality under a new law which extends Spanish nationality to the grandchildren of Spaniards.