El Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua) 4/18/09

(Full translation of an opinion column by Macario Schettino, titled “What do we want?” Article was datelined Mexico City)

We are more than 120 million Mexicans. A hundred, or a bit more, in Mexico, and 20 in the rest of the world. Almost all in the United States. In the next 20 years, we’ll possibly be 120 million just in the country, and perhaps 35 million outside. Together with other Latin American immigrants, Mexicans will constitute the largest minority in the United States, with a voting power near 20%. In a country where the presidency is decided by some few percentage points.

In those 20 years, the United States will continue to be the world’s leading power. And it’s possible that it will not have a contender in geo-strategic issues for another 20, though perhaps it might no longer be the world’s leading economy. Many things are going to happen in the next two decades, but it’s not very probable that what I have just mentioned will be otherwise. It matters little what we think, but the United States will continue to be the center of the world, the Mexicans will continue to migrate there, and they will be ever more important, as much economically as in politics.

Forty years ago it wasn’t so. Almost all we Mexicans lived in Mexico, and the world had two apparently comparable powers. The rest of the world grouped itself around those two poles, and the residue was called the third world, although in reality there was never any residual, all was bipolar.

In the world of 40 years ago, Mexico had a certain logic that ended up becoming a failure. We were leaders of that third world, according to us, and we had our own way of organizing our economy and our politics. We told ourselves that it was good enough to administer our abundance, and we didn’t want anything other than the advancement of the Revolution , properly represented by this country’s only party. That was 40 years ago. Twenty later, the world ceased being bipolar, we were already in a practically permanent economic crisis and the collapse of the revolutionary regime was starting. By then the flow of Mexicans toward the United States was significant.

But today we go on not knowing what to do with our country, and for the same reason we cannot set forth an adequate relation with the United States. That logic of “self-determination and no intervention” which above all served to avoid scrutinies about our authoritarian political system, does not seem to make much sense in this XXI century. I don’t mean to say that national sovereignty must be surrendered, much to the contrary. What I mean is that in this century sovereignty doesn’t have much to do with self determination and non intervention, but with globalism and mutual responsibility. And we are not understanding that.

Mexicans are more and more no longer only Mexico. With each passing year, Mexicans are also United States citizens who elect mayors and governors in their place of residence, which is the United States. And that thing about self determination doesn’t help them one bit. The importance of the Hispanic vote, as they call it there, is growing, and U.S. politicians will seek it out. And for that reason they are going to want a migratory reform, to straighten out the 12 to 15 million illegal migrants, and the wave of at least more than a million immigrants a year that will arrive in the following two decades. Mexicans compose half of that.

The failed policies to promote the internal market provoked the great emigration we’ve had. The disastrous educational system we have condemns those migrants to arrive there to obtain the worst jobs. Our permanent hostility toward the United States government, our most haughty demand that we be well treated while we abuse the Central Americans, our hidden hate for those who wrenched away from us half of the national territory condemn those migrants to a hostility, abuse and hatred of the same magnitude.

If it is clear that 15 million Mexicans will move to the neighbor country in the next 20 years. If it is clear that they, besides those who today live there, will be the determinant factor in the internal elections in many states and even of the president of the United States. If it is clear that there will not be another world power in the world than our neighbor. If all this is clear, couldn’t we build an agenda that would allow us to benefit to the maximum from these events?

Because what is not going to happen is that the world will return to what it was 40 years ago, despite the clamoring from nostalgic persons who believe that the economic crisis is a preamble for a new status and protectionist era. And it isn’t going to happen that Mexico will have an abundance to administer, or a single party to govern itself, nor a way to feed its 120 million sons, who today are scattered around the world. There are things that can happen and things that cannot. To prepare for what is not going to happen is absurd.