Mexico’s president said Friday that he is willing to help out with a surge of migrants that led to the closure of border crossings with the United States, but he wants the U.S. government to open talks with Cuba and send more development aid to migrants’ home countries.
The comments by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador came a day after the U.S. announced that a delegation of top U.S. officials would visit Mexico for talks on how to enforce immigration rules at the two countries’ shared border.
Also Friday, U.S. authorities reopened two cross-border railroad crossings in Texas, while keeping operations limited or suspended at other border crossings. And figures released Friday show arrests for crossing the U.S. border from Mexico nudged 1.2% higher in November from October, one of the latest signs of what Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, described this week as “unprecedented” migration flows.
I agree Florida is probably a lost cause, but making a policy decision based on that alone isn’t how you win the game American politicians are forced to play.
“What would turn red?”, is one question that must be asked, and assuming Florida is a lost cause, the answer may well be “nothing”. But an equally important question is, “What would turn blue?”, and unfortunately, I would guess the answer is also “nothing”. Conservative Texans would be stoked to get help from Mexico at the border, but they’re not gonna vote for Biden over it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if being “soft on Cuba” is still a losing position among several Dem bases, especially older neoliberals.
Relief from immigration pressure would reduce the validity of complaints about the ‘migrant crush’, which might improve numbers amongst ‘swing voters’, and the end of the dispute with Cuba would be positive for the Biden administration’s foreign policy efforts, considering that our position on Cuba is still deeply unpopular internationally.