Do We Need a Mexico Lobby? Should We Fear One?
Yesterday, someone asked what I thought of this post at the Latino Politics Blog calling for the creation of a “Mexico lobby” along the lines of the Israel lobby or the Cuba lobby. My first thought, of course, is that the author of the piece is a raging anti-semite as is everyone who thinks that the US-Israeli relationship is the result of domestic ethnic lobbying efforts rather than an exquisitely rational calculus of American national interests.
Joking aside, I think the issue here is that the Mexican-American population is probably too big to support a cohesive “lobby” pushing a very specific agenda. Beyond that, the US-Mexican relationship is already very close. Our countries are adjacent to one another, have very integrated markets in most goods and services, and obviously there’s a lot of flow of people across the boarder. This means that the main issues on the US-Mexico bilateral agenda—NAFTA and immigration—are both big time issues in American politics writ large. They’re not under-the-radar things that are amenable to narrow lobbying. The result is that Mexican-American participation in these issues, though both quite influential and quite real, has a totally different flavor from efforts to court Cuban or Jewish voters or donors through appeals related to Cuba policy or Israel policy.
25 Responses to “Do We Need a Mexico Lobby? Should We Fear One?”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
April 15th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Yesterday, someone asked what I thought of this post at the Latino Politics Blog calling for the creation of a “Mexico lobby” along the lines of the Israel lobby or the Cuba lobby.
Why would they need a lobby when they’ve already purchased control of the government from corrupt politicians?
(pssst: Lonewacko: did I get that right?)
April 15th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
MattY is, of course, confused. Several supposedly American politicians frequently act like paid agents of the MexicanGovernment. And, that government already has a de facto lobbying organization inside the U.S. through their direct or indirect links to various non-profit groups. There are too many to list, but the ACLU is directly collaborating with that government, and the SPLC is part of a group headed by a lawyer with a long line of links to that government. And, many of the marches were organized by those linked to that government.
And, all of that is completely below MattY’s radar.
Rather than sitting here and trying to provide hundreds of links, just subscribe to my feed to learn all the many things that MattY doesn’t know. In my right sidebar start typing a person’s name in the first search box to see recent posts about them. Use the third search box to do a full text search through thousands of posts since 2002. And, almost all of it is something that MattY has no knowledge of.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
What would a “Mexico Lobby” lobby for? And in whose interests? Which Mexicans? Carlos Slim types already seem to have pretty effective representation — former right wing President Vicente Fox was a former head of Coca-Cola.
U.S. policy has already long had a tilt for the most right wing and pro-corporate of Mexico policies. You mention NAFTA, for example, while a majority of Mexicans may actually oppose the agreement, depending on polls.
Do you mean a “Mexican-American Lobby”? If so, there, too, you’re talking about a huge, geographically and economically diverse community not dominated (like the original Cuban lobbies) by a small set of extraordinarily wealthy patrons. Although maybe the Slim types could create such a thing, though the motivation is unclear.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Also Mexican and US interests are far more alligned than US interests with Israel.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Hey Matt,
Lebron james is considering the Jewish faith. This needs your expert commentary.
http://www.cleveland.com/ohio-sports-blog/index.ssf/2009/04/is_lebron_james_jewish.html.
Looking forward to reading a post after I am back from The Q where I hope we go 41-1 without LBJ,Mo,Z,Joe, and Big Ben.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Just realized that the link works without the period.
http://www.cleveland.com/ohio-sports-blog/index.ssf/2009/04/is_lebron_james_jewish.html
April 15th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
How was your Dirty Sanchez party, Lonewacko?
Did the check from the VeryPowerfulInterests who underwrite your hate campaign clear in time?
April 15th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
An attack with conventional bombs is not likely to halt the program. Then what?
Everyone discusses this as if Israel can just waltz in and bomb at their leisure like the us has done with every single bomb it has launched or dropped since 1973. Iran has a credible air defense in place. The US could overwhelm it and it’s radars with it’s huge long range capabilities and its Iraq and Carrier forces. Israel could not.
This isn’t some freaking video game. If Israel wants to end any chance of a threat from Iran they will have to nuke them. Don’t laugh. If that isn’t on the table in Israel then they are fools. This stuff isn’t pretend. Either that or hope the US gets drawn in to finish off the job they start.
I predict before it’s over a minimum 20 million dead Persians. Let’s say over a decade. The Iranians are total and utter fools for following the nuke course because it gives them nothing. It just gives others an excuse to attack them. Don’t they appreciate the absolute blood lust of the American and Israeli right? You can scoff at that if you want but they want death on a large scale. Iran is perfect. It has no friends.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
#7 is libelous, and it looks like I’m going to have to take legal action.
If someone from CAP is reading this, please preserve the information relating to comment #7, including IP address and any other identifying information.
April 15th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
As someone elsewhere said after one of Lonewacko’s many, many similar threats:
“This from the guy that is such a pussy he has to beg other people to ask ToughQuestions to politicians for him.”
April 15th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
What’s the “Cuba lobby”? Angry Floridians dedicated to keeping Cubans poor and isolated. Hardly the same thing as the Israel lobby.
Call it anti-Cuba lobby.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Lonewacko is as ignorant of libel law as he is of every other topic he comments on.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Perhaps Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants to return his state to Mexican ownership so that he can run to be next President of Mexico and he needs a US lobby group to raise his profile? I can think of no other reason for his traitorous and un-American proposal to secede from the Union. Are all tea-party Republicans as anti-American as Perry?
April 15th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Yeah, I’m not sure what a Mexican-American lobby would focus on. Unless there was consensus on what core issues to whittle down to, it would end up just being an excuse to blow donor money on offices in D.C.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I am in favour of it as long as I don’t find slimy illegal aliens on its membership rolls and being its beneficiaries.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Aside from the “they don’t really need it” critique, the other problem is that a “Mexico Lobby” would immediately become a focal point of attack from anti-immigration groups. Why give them a target?
April 15th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Lobbies exchange votes and contributions for stuff. It seems to me that the argument needs to be that Mexico or Mexican Americans either don’t vote, don’t have money to contribute to politicians or don’t want the usual stuff that interests groups want. Asserting that their interests are too diverse or scattered to be worthy of a formal lobbying effort seems very weak.
As for the ‘close’ argument, I suspect the our wonderful gummint has a very close relationship with big business, Wall St., and Big Pharma and they all have very effective lobbying efforts making sure it stays that way. I think that is how it works.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
I am in favour of it as long as I don’t find slimy illegal aliens on its membership rolls and being its beneficiaries.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Matthew Yglesias was a bit flippant and too quick to dismiss a good idea from Seneca. There are a number of reasons why a Mexican-American lobby group would actually be step in the right direction, if only to represent the interest the millions of undocumented Mexican citizens working and residing in the US. Those millions of undocumented immigrants end up providing the second largest source of revenue to Mexico, some $20+ Billion Dollars per year, compared to the $40+ Billion Dollars in oil exports. It’s not difficult to imagine the state of the Mexicos economy in absence of $20+ Billion Dollars in remittances derived largely from Mexican migrant workers.
Fact is the US/Mexico relations are very complex and they are about to become even much more so with the possible passage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform by the Obama Administration.
It’s not enough that the two countries share a border, that they enacted NAFTA, that they are important trading partners. Fact is that the US-Mexico bilateral agenda-NAFTA and immigration-are issues that both countries sorely neglect, perhaps a Mexican-American lobby group could help bridge that gap.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Re: I am in favour of it as long as I don’t find slimy illegal aliens on its membership rolls and being its beneficiaries.
Is this guy for real?
April 16th, 2009 at 1:43 am
Do we need a Mexican lobby? I have no idea.
I do know we need a successful legalize-drugs lobby, because the American-Mexican relationship is quickly heading south, literally and figuratively.
April 16th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Matt,
The older I become, the less the conventional racist idiocies lingering from a childhood in Idaho persist in warping my perceptions of my fellow humans. Oddly enough, anti-semitism was not one of the local prejudices, perhaps — and skirting dangerously near the extra-hackneyed cliché — because my family was friendly with most of the Jewish families in town and it never would have occurred to us to denigrate them for either their religion (about which little was ever discussed, apart from the rare Seder invitation) or their ethnicity, which in the frontier West was white because it wasn’t Latino, Asian, or Black. There were precious few variations in skin pigment in any case.
All this is by way of saying that I learned anti-semitism as a liberal adult utterly appalled at the influence of an omnipotent Israeli lobby shamelessly exploiting the American people to militarily scorn the United Nations, wreck destruction on their neighbors and defy common decency.
So it distresses me to read you so facilely grouping the Israeli lobby with other nationalist interests. Yes, I know you are Jewish as well as Hispanic. Nonetheless the Israelis are shamelessly bilking the American taxpayers for billions to fund their militarist paranoia and regional imperialism. (Teabag that you Republican stooges!) Say what you like about Castro’s Cuba, post-Castro Cuba and a Mexican government whose cajones are firmly in the grip of drug traffickers, as D.C. lobbies, none of these interests is analogous.
We all know you are smart as hell, but please do pause occasionally to consider the soundness of your remarks before pressing the key to publish them to the world.
Thanks.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:08 am
tony herrera pretty much nails it. But it’s obvious: they’re are many issues that we and Mexico share. Of course there should be a Mexican lobby. And it would behoove them to be strong. And we would be wise to listen to them. We will not solve any border problems by refusing to listen to those that are on the other side of the border. We try to solve problems by cocooning ourselves and thinking that nobody else in the world has something to offer. That hasn’t worked. And there’s fifty thousand names on a hunk of granite in DC to prove that. If we really want to solve the border issues with Mexico, thy need to have some real input on it. We can shut them out, but it will be our loss. We can build a fence, but someone will always build a ladder taller than our fence.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Someone wants to make sure that we never legalize drugs.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:18 am
fostert: you have to take El Cid’s point into account, which is to say that there’s a schism between the current nation-to-nation arrangement, in which both major American parties cultivate relationships with the Mexican right, and the social arrangement defined by immigration to the US.
That’s to say, the interests of the average person of Mexican origin or descent in the US, regardless of legal status, has little to do with US-Mexico relations. (That’s actually true w/r/t the majority Jews and US-Israel relations, though it doesn’t often seem that way.)
Throw on top of that the US business interests who enjoy the arbitrage of NAFTA, and it’s hard to see a coherent lobby forming around such disparate groups.
Nativist cranks like you-know-who skew the discussion, but it ought to be a progressive interest — and a realist foreign policy interest — to encourage the kind of government in Mexico that doesn’t rely upon mass emigration to stay in power. In that regard, enforcement has to be part of the equation, to make Calderon’s government address the socioeconomic forces that now drive people over the border.
It’s a set of tradeoffs. If investment in Mexico creates jobs there instead of the US, but does so in a way that discourages people from entering the US illegally, then it’s a pragmatic good. You can bet that Loud Obbs will complain about it, though.