People in our so-called Rust Belt have lost out, and politics and society have not been responsive either in providing the kind of additional support they need or to retrain them for jobs that are being created in the new economy.
We have to remember that information sharing is restricted by legal barriers and cultural barriers and by the notion that information is power and therefore should be hoarded so if you share information you can extract something in exchange.
In the last generation we’ve moved past a U.S.-Mexico relationship that while friendly on the surface, and demilitarized for the most part, really was not a genuinely cooperative relationship.
I think there’s no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border.
We do a trillion dollars in trade among the three countries; more than 18,000 American companies are involved in foreign direct investment in Mexico and Canada.
You need a strategy that involves layered defense: deployed patrols, sophisticated sensor equipment, and surveillance from the air. That is what has had a positive impact over the last generation.
But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.
Cross-border trade is part of a single production process, and while apparently the Trump administration will seek to re-examine elements of that production platform, it is what it is and won’t be easily dismantled.
Six million jobs in the US depend on trade with Mexico. Ten border states – six in Mexico and four in the United States – combined have the third or fourth largest economy in the world.
In large part this is because of the success of policies followed by the United States to create an environment, a peaceful period in history in which economies could grow and countries could benefit.
