Bulletin
February 5, 2021
With signaling from the new
White House and the AMLO administration moving into concrete discussions about
cooperation on health, migration, infrastructure, security, and
competitiveness, it is almost time to “kiss and make up.”
From November through
January, AMLO seemed to be trying to raise points of contention with the United
States to burnish his credentials within Mexico. We now anticipate that AMLO
will have an incentive to establish a working, synergistic relationship with
Joe Biden.
Our border region will be in
play now more than ever. This is a “threshold moment.” Once again, border voice
needs to be heard, and who better than our binational Stakeholders! I sincerely
encourage our Stakeholders to reflect on their potential to influence
perceptions and aspirations regarding the border constructively. I am available
for any kind of initiative Stakeholders would like to discuss.
*****
Public health at land ports will become
an important policy topic in the weeks and months to come.
On the U.S. side,
the Secretary of State, in consultation with the secretaries of Health and
Human Services, Transportation, and Homeland Security alongside the Director of
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has started diplomatic
outreach to the governments of Canada and Mexico regarding public health protocols for land ports of entry.
Based on this
diplomatic engagement, the Secretary of
HHS (Health and Human Services), the Secretary
of Transportation, and the Secretary
of Homeland Security will submit to President
Biden a plan to implement appropriate public health measures at land ports
of entry.
The plan should
implement CDC guidelines, consistent with applicable law, and take into account
the operational considerations relevant to the different populations who enter
the United States by land.
*****
John McNeece,
Senior Fellow for Energy and Trade at the Center for U.S.-Mexican
Studies and renowned attorney, spoke about the State of Baja
California’s 2020 bid tender for a solar energy project.
Originally, the state needed a less expensive power source to pump Colorado
River water from Mexicali to Tijuana, but it turns out that the power
need goes well beyond this.
The state did this in the face of Mexican federal
government resistance, and though the contract was awarded last October for
delivery of 929,290 Megawatts/hour per year, 20-30% cheaper than the federal
electricity commission (CFE), the federal government has so far declined to
grant the necessary permits for the project. The contract cannot be implemented
without those permits.
The conflict over Baja’s planned solar project opens
another crack in the deteriorating relationship between AMLO and
Governor Bonilla.
*****
Ev
Meade is leading a team from the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the
University of San Diego documenting case studies of social innovation on the border and interviewed our co-chair Pepe
Larroque and me about the Smart Border Coalition’s role in this. Ev and his
students showed great curiosity about our organization. We can’t wait to hear
about other cases in our region!
*****
With Covid vaccination in full swing in San Diego and just starting in
Baja California, it is clear that the process in Mexico will take much longer
to reach
herd immunity. Vaccines are
not arriving in Mexico fast enough. Many in Tijuana are wondering whether they
will get their first shot before the summer.
We are seeing many Mexican
nationals flying to California airports for the sole purpose of getting
injected. Many more will come. The question that U.S. taxpayers are asking is
whether foreigners should get the vaccine. There is a question of fairness and
legality in some people’s minds. In Mexico, there is an equity aspect to this,
highlighting great income disparity: the rich can travel to get vaccinated, the
poor stay put and must wait.
Public health officials take
the position that everyone needs to get vaccinated regardless of immigration
status if the city, county, or country will have a chance at stopping or
slowing the virus spread. Herd immunity
is agnostic as to whether people have travel documents.
*****
President Biden
has taken bold moves on immigration to start his administra-tion.
His three-part plan for safe, lawful, and orderly migration in the region starts
with addressing the underlying causes of
migration through a strategy to confront the instability, violence, and
economic insecurity that currently drive migrants from their homes.
Second, the Administration will
collaborate with regional partners, including foreign governments,
international organizations, and nonprofits to shore up other countries’ capacity to provide protection and
opportunities to asylum seekers and migrants closer to home.
Finally, the Administration will ensure that Central American refugees and
asylum seekers have access to legal avenues to the United States. The U.S. Secretary
of Homeland Security is also directed to review the Migrant Protection
Protocols (MPP) program (https://Bit.ly/2MqSq3T).
The President sent to Congress
legislation that creates a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 11 million
undocumented immigrants living in and contributing to the U.S. He has outlined steps to preserve and fortify
protections for Dreamers, end the Muslim and Africa ban, and halt border wall
construction.
He has made clear that reversing the
Trump Administration’s immigration policies that separated thousands of
families at the border is a top priority. He wants to develop a strategy to address irregular
migration across the southern border and create a humane asylum
system.
*****
In a recent Center for US-Mexican Studies
conference on the AMLO and Biden relationship, Celina Realuyo, Professor of Practice at the William J. Perry
Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at National Defense University, made
important comments about the bilateral
relationship.
Cooperation will be complicated. We are seeing the growth of organized crime in Mexico,
where 7 out of 10 homicides are committed with weapons illegally imported from
the U.S. Vaccination efforts are activating drug cartels more than ever. There
will be vaccine and covid test contraband into Mexico.
Other aspects clouding the
relationship have been the return of former defense secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos to Mexico
after being arrested for drug trafficking activity in the U.S. and his
subsequent exoneration; and the new security
law establishing restrictions to foreign agents doing work in Mexico (DEA,
FBI). And let’s not forget caravans surfacing once again,
requiring both countries to work on policies to bring security to the border.
*****
Geronimo Gutierrez, former North American Development
Bank Director and former Mexican ambassador to the United States, has been very active in networking circles. He is a managing partner for Beel
Infrastructure Partners (www.beelinfra.com).
I find him to be open and
direct and agree with many of his opinions. He looks at the border in terms of
a management challenge in the areas
of economy/ competitiveness, security
and migration.
He supports the notion of
depoliticizing migration so that our countries seriously consider a regional
mechanism to address deep-rooted problems. He believes that climate change is producing water
shortages and that we should
bilaterally approach this
large issue head-on, consistently, not as an on-and-off topic.
Competitiveness
calls for a real joint plan for trade corridors and ports of entry. I realize
we have our regional border master plan, but we should add a much more
tactical, operational focus to it.
*****
It was good to speak with Julie Coker, CEO of the San Diego Tourism
Authority (SDTA), last week.
As a recent arrival to San Diego from Philadelphia, Julie led that city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and made
her mark at Hyatt Hotels for more
than 21 years. Though tourism has taken an enormous hit, Julie is optimistic
about a strong rebound later this year. The SDTA is funded from a 2% occupancy
tax on all hotel stays.
I have looked at data from
the SDTA and believe it gives us some pointers about how we could find better
data for cross-border spending patterns. A key source for their data is the
Visa View program that allows companies to find out spending activity using
Visa cards in a particular commercial establishment. This is useful in tracking
the use of cards not from zip codes in our area. Given a healthy budget for it,
we could have a similar way of capturing spend activity on the border.
******
The Baja California local development councils are exploring ways to
get additional vaccines much faster to state’s cities through a private
enterprise-government plan. This is an
effort that will require a great deal of coordination on both sides of the
border. It could be a truly historic binational project!
*****
As our coalition starts uncovering new ways of harnessing
data to give the binational community better information about their travel
preferences, we have begun to discover creative, resourceful, and successful
companies that perform both software development and user experience work.
Two of these companies are Everest Software Solutions (https://www.everest.ws/everest/), and Bajalogics (www.bajalogics.com).
Everest has developed solutions for several industry
verticals like medical, and Bajalogics prides itself on custom solutions for
small- and medium-sized businesses.
Both are part of a pioneering group of companies on the border
with talented and highly educated personnel as well as the burgeoning
information technology service economy in Tijuana.
Not long ago, software development in Tijuana was
concentrated at the plant level, with plants having all development in-house.
However, we are seeing a shift to independent developers and a potential surge
in software R&D centers.
*****
I was pleased to open a
conversation with Gaby Lagarda,
executive director of ARHITAC (http://arhitac.org/), the
Association of Industry Human Resources in Tijuana. It was founded in 1984 with
the objective to deliver continuous improvement to companies in the area. They have 275 members, with mostly HR
department managers representing members at association meetings. 80%-85% of
members are manufacturing plants and 15%-20% are vendors to the maquila industry. With the future of workforce development becoming a huge binational topic,
organizations such as ARHITAC must be at the discussion table.
*****
UCSD’s Emerging Stronger
Together session in late January featured binational education, and one topic
that caught my attention was the “Transnational/Undocumented
Students Support Team” (TrUSST), designed to support migrant students
during the COVID-19 crisis.
It turns out there are 49,760 U.S.-born students in Baja California public
schools, with over half of them in the elementary school system.
Because of this, there is a recommendation to create a bilingual-binational San Diego County
Office of Education distance/hybrid learning secondary school to allow a
“bi-literacy” certification on both sides of the border.
*****
Kudos for Consuls General Saarnio
and González for organizing the Cali-Baja Dialogues since last year.
They have proven to be great forums and a testament to the collaborative power
of our top diplomats.
We recently joined a meeting on the topic of economic development, where Mexicali, Tijuana, and San Diego city
government representatives presented reactivation plans and some numbers on
what the virus impact has been.
For example, Tijuana crossings into the U.S. since March are down, on
average, 36%. Airport traffic, bus travelers into the city and travelers from
Tijuana to Ensenada are all down 29, 45, and 55%, respectively. Medical tourism
has decreased between 50% and 60%. Between 20% and 30% of all businesses have
closed temporarily.
However, Tijuana picked up 23,000 new jobs. There is NO other Mexican
city that reflected this large a job increase. The city also got $190 million
in foreign and domestic private capital investment last year, a greater sum
than in 2019.
*****
Melissa Floca recently became program officer for
cross-border initiatives at the Kroc
Institute for Peace and Justice at USD. She has been leading a new program
called “Border Fellows.” It is
designed for people whose work contributes to making the border region more
peaceful and inclusive. The non-residential board fellows will receive an
$850/month fellowship and a $5,000 grant to support their work. The information
session is February 11, and the application deadline is February 22. https://bit.ly/3c0rDFK
*****
The Tuesday, February 2 meeting of the South County EDC board focused on health. It was wonderful to see
how Chula Vista’s Vaccine Super Center
has got rave reviews thanks to the cooperation of Mayor Mary Salas and her team with Sharp Chula Vista Hospital. Brookfield
Properties offered space for the location in the old Sears building, so a
perfect example of government, business, and civil society working together to
make incredible things happen.
*****
Eduardo Cabrera of KIN
Engineering Services continues to promote a game-changing process to rid the
border of long wait times. His “Smart
Border System” to book drivers before they make their way to the ports has
been gaining traction with different groups in San Diego and Tijuana. Based on
the many geographic and financial constraints of current ports of entry, projects
like this one are the future of more efficient border crossings.
*****
This week Tijuana Mayor Arturo González
Cruz announced he will be taking a leave of absence (licencia) for a second time in less than 2 years. His Economic Development Secretary Arturo Pérez-Behr resigned. This sends a
clear message about the destructive nature of electoral politics when the
Governor and city mayors do not see eye to eye, even though they’re in the same
political party.
We often talk about how lack of public administration continuity affects
the binational relationship. We lost the top two people in the city in a couple
of days. What next? We trust that interim Mayor
Karla Ruiz MacFarland can fill the void once again.
*****
The North American
Strategy for Competitiveness group (nasconetwork.com/) had its COVID Working Group meeting on February
3, with Kristie B. McKinney,
International Relations Specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Deborah Meyers, Director, Canadian
Affairs and Senior Advisor on North America at the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security. When pressed on the lifting of restrictions to non-essential travel
at the land ports, their responses left much to be desired.
There is an “ongoing dialogue”
between U.S. and Mexican authorities on this, but no conclusions yet. How long
will this “dialogue” go? Nothing is off
the table, including covid testing for cargo drivers and for people crossing
into the U.S.
Imagine the chaos that we would have on our hands if there was mandatory
testing each time one wanted to cross the border. We currently have NO
screening system, NO ability to test on site, and NO pre-crossing
advanced notifications. So we are in the
worst of all worlds.
My thought is that we
must approach motivated organizations such as The Commons Project (thecommonsproject.org/commonpass) which aims to create common standard proving a
traveller is Covid-free or vaccinated, and companies such as Health (the people’s passport), Clear (clearme.com/), AOK
Pass (aokpass.com/) and others to have them work on a practical
solution to add the covid test to travelers’ data when they arrive at the booths.
These companies have worked on air travel, so why not have them pivot to land
travel before we suffer through a new set of border restrictions?
*****
We have launched the El Tercer País campaign with a first round of hardcover books to
government officials and San Diego business people. We have sent ebooks to
media in Mexico and the United States. Upcoming rounds will focus on business,
academia and non-profits on both sides of the border. We plan on distributing
close to 1,000 books. I want to thank
both Vincent Blocker and Miguel Gama for spending many hours on this effort.
*****
Our next online Stakeholders
Working Committee meeting will convene on Zoom on March 4th
from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. The coalition warmly welcomes broad, open participation
by all U.S. and Mexican (and all other) parties interested in port of entry
operations from any perspective. It will be the first meeting of 2021. Please
register in advance at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpf-CppzgrH9XMRRpHOQ5mDCNayoJ9XYHa
After registering, you will
receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
It will be excellent to see all of you!
Gustavo De La Fuente
Executive Director
gdelafuente@smartbordercoalition.com
(619) 814-1386