The immigration drama forces both countries to abandon their respective internal agendas and face a pact that regulates it.
The bilateral agenda of Mexico and the United States is composed of many emergencies, as migration does not determine the daily relationship between the two countries. The crisis at the border, where U.S. authorities are holding more than 7,000 people every day, the situation has become unsustainable and leads Washington to define without further delay a regulatory framework, for which it needs Mexico. And while Donald Trump has done so by way of taxation, Biden wants to negotiate a solution with his counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Finding a deal isn’t going to be easy, starting with the White House’s hesitation. The Democratic administration was planning to withdraw Title 42 at the end of May, a regulation approved by Trump in the midst of the pandemic that allows for quick deportations under health pretexts. Republicans have made the immigration push a banner to try to discredit Biden and threaten to take the issue to the Democrats’ Congress, but Biden himself has previously supported keeping the tool in place.
At the same time, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is facing this phenomenon with a series of open fronts with the US administration. In recent days, the two leaders have spoken by phone and Secretary of State Antony Blinken has received a visit from Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard. They agreed on a joint plan to provide employment opportunities in Central America to address the real structural causes of migration.
To the northern triangle of this region, from where most of the migrants leave, plus tens of thousands of fellow Haitians and Cubans, the Mexican president visited Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and then Cuba. He did so with the promise of strengthening the protection of the southern border, knowing that whatever happens there will sooner or later spill over to the northern border. But before the visit, López Obrador also threw a dart at the United States, criticizing it for sending millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine when it has not yet authorized the $4 billion investment in Central America.
The message was probably intended more for her own supporters than to be useful in a diplomatic strategy. But the daily drama that is the migration crisis for hundreds of thousands of people is forcing both Mexico and the United States to parry their internal agendas and expedite a migration agreement as quickly as possible.