Jorge G. Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico, is a professor at New York University and the author of America Through Foreign Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2020). This is his last editorial contribution to Project Syndicate:
There is no question that immigration was a defining issue in last month’s US presidential election. Donald Trump used the growing number of asylum seekers and economic migrants entering the United States from early 2021 through the beginning of this year to argue that President Joe Biden’s administration – including his vice president, and Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris – had been “soft on immigration.” This narrative helped Trump win the election. But how credible was it?
Trump’s campaign narrative left out a few crucial facts – not least that immigration flows across the US border with Mexico fell sharply this year. But perhaps more interesting is what happened just before this shift. On December 1, 2023, the head of the National Institute of Migration (INM) – Mexico’s federal immigration agency – announced that the institute had run out of money and would thus halt migrant transfers and deportations and suspend migration-related patrols across the country.
That month, US border authorities reported 249,741 “encounters” with migrants crossing the US-Mexico border – the highest number ever recorded in a single month – with as many as 13,000 occurring in a single day. In an effort to manage the surge, the US shut down important railroad crossings in Lukeville, Arizona, and Eagle Pass and El Paso, Texas.
Moreover, on December 27, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas made an unscheduled visit to Mexico City to urge the country’s president at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (widely known as AMLO), to restart efforts to curb migration. AMLO agreed, and migration flows soon plummeted.
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