Texas tries to avoid Trump-Mexico fray
With a war of words flying between President Donald Trump and the government of Mexico over immigration and trade, Texas — which benefits from commerce over its southern border more than any other state — is just trying to keep its head down.
While posting selfies with Trump from the Oval Office, Gov. Greg Abbott has said little about the president’s as-yet-unfunded plan to build a border wall or his insistence that the North American Free Trade Agreement has been “disastrous” for U.S. workers, both of which have made relations with Mexico touchy at best.
Abbott’s top deputy on international trade, Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, deflected questions about how the governor would like to see NAFTA changed, if at all.
“We want to make sure that whatever happens with NAFTA, which is technically beyond our control, improves both Texas’ and Mexico’s economies, especially along the border,” Pablos said in an interview Friday.
In Houston for the Offshore Technology Conference this week, Pablos focused on introducing Mexican officials to Texas businesses hoping to benefit from opportunities in the newly liberalized oil and gas sector. Although manufacturing orders on the border have dropped off slightly, Pablos said he doesn’t attribute that to the new administration, and doesn’t think saberrattling on NAFTA or the border wall has hurt relations between Texas and its southern neighbor.
“Mexico understands that this is a federal issue,” Pablos said. “Specifically in the private sector, I think many realize that there’s already a wall. And El Paso and Juarez have fared extremely well
with international trade in spite of that.”
It’s true that fences in the more populated stretches of the border have gates, in which Texas has invested millions to facilitate both imports and exports. But according to economist Ray Perryman, extending the fence all the way across the state, as Trump has demanded, could disrupt migration, integrated supply chains and cultural bonds.
“The presence of the wall would almost certainly decrease efficiency in these interactions,” Perryman said, “and the associated political statement could have an adverse and lasting effect that in the long run far outweighs the temporary stimulus we see from construction.”