James Lamb provides an overview of issues facing both Mexico and the United States, including inequality, globalization, and political instability.
The United States and Mexico not only share a 2,000-mile border — walls, fences, and patrols notwithstanding — but will remain highly integrated neighbors, whatever the quality of the relationship. As the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes put it, paraphrasing a famed statement by the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz a century earlier, “Poor Mexico, and poor United States, so far from God and so close to each other!” That said, the incendiary rhetoric targeting Mexico and immigrants in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and much of what has happened since to translate that rhetoric into policies have fueled a hostile atmosphere and put sharp strains on the relationship.
