Mexico is the forgotten story of US election

At which point maybe Mexico will have to tighten its border security

By Edward Luce

They say elections have consequences. But it is doubtful November 6 will have much impact on the biggest trend facing the US – its transformation into a Latin American country. Not only is the difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney incidental to the tides of US demography and regional integration. But the debate between the two is irrelevant to them.

Consider this: Mexico is fast turning into America’s most important trading partner – and is already its second-largest export market. Yet the only context in which the country is mentioned on the campaign trail is drugs or illegal immigration. It is rare that reality and politics so sharply diverge.

Here is Uncle Sam’s Latin American reality. First, Mexico is rapidly becoming as important to the US economy as China. There has been much excitement in recent months about the possibility of “reshoring” manufacturing jobs from China to America. If you broaden the destination to North America, the trend is already under way. Mexico is now vying with China as the manufacturing hub of choice for US and other multinational companies – it is as economically integrated with the US as any two members of the eurozone are to each other.

Much of this is driven by the rise in the cost of oil, which makes transport costs increasingly pricey for US companies to make goods for domestic consumption as far away as east Asia. And most of the rest is driven by Chinese wage inflation. In 2000, the average Chinese worker was paid 35 cents an hour versus $1.72 in Mexico, according to HSBC. Now the Mexican gets paid $2.11 an hour and the Chinese $1.63. Pretty soon Mexico will have the lower labour costs.

As a result of their country’s manufacturing boom, Mexicans are no longer quite so hungry to work on US construction sites or pick fruit in California and Florida. Contrary to what the US election debate would imply, illegal immigration to the US has been in reverse for several years. Ten years ago, roughly 800,000 Mexicans crossed the border every year to the US, mostly illegally. Today the flow is the other way. The greatest peaceful emigration in the history of immigrants is over. Neither Mr Obama nor Mr Romney appears to have received that memo, although the president has assisted the trend by deporting almost 1.5m illegal immigrants – more than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined.

Nowadays, Mexicans are as likely to cross the border to the US to invest. As my colleague Adam Thomson has reported, there is a boom in Mexican corporate activity north of the border.

In Mexico, they jokingly call it the reconquista – the country lost a huge amount of territory to the US in the war of 1846. In the US, they still think of it as a law and order problem. But the significance of US-Mexican integration is economic. Companies such as Cemex, which is the largest cement maker in the US, and Grupo Bimbo, which recently acquired Sara Lee for almost $1bn, are leading the way. Univision, which is now partly owned by Televisa, the Mexican broadcaster, is now the fifth-largest television network in the US. Soon it may break into the top three.

Second, America’s demography is changing at vertiginous speed. Many focus on the distant horizon of 2050, when Mexican-Americans are projected to account for a third of the US population. But today’s numbers are dizzying enough. In Texas and California, America’s two most populous states, a majority of schoolchildren are now Hispanic. They are tomorrow’s voters. It is doubtful they will tolerate a US-Mexican relationship that is largely couched as a law and order issue.

In his secretly recorded remarks to a private fundraiser in May, Mr Romney joked that “had [my father] been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this election”. The Republican nominee’s father was raised in an American Mormon colony in Mexico that still plays host to a branch of the family. Fewer than a third of the US’s Hispanic voters are likely to choose Mr Romney next month. But the other two-thirds are not embracing Mr Obama with much enthusiasm.

When will perception catch up with reality? Twenty years ago, Ross Perot upended the race between George Bush senior and Mr Clinton when he entered as a third party candidate. The next year he almost destroyed the passage of Nafta, the North American trade deal that Mr Clinton just squeaked through Congress. The Texan maverick associated Nafta with the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south. He was wrong about that – both economies have profited and they are now joined at the hip.

Yet if Mr Perot had predicted a giant vacuuming of wages to Mexico, he may have been closer to the mark. As the Mexican middle class gets richer, it will narrow the differential with the beleaguered American middle class – indeed, these are two sides of the same coin. At which point – who knows? – maybe Mexico will have to tighten its border security.