Obrador should focus on Mexico

SAN DIEGO — As a Mexican American, I’ve spent all my life wandering around the “in-between.”

Growing up in the farmland of California’s Central Valley, I was considered “Mexican.” But when I ventured into Mexico, I was an “American.” I often feel like a man without a country.

But not one without a grudge. I have mucho resentment toward Mexico — about a century’s worth, in fact. During the Mexican Revolution, the country’s economic system of haves and have nots had nothing to offer a poor, dark-skinned, undereducated 8-year-old boy and his family from Chihuahua. The migrants crossed into the United States legally and started new lives.

That boy was my grandfather, Roman, and everything he and my Texas-born grandmother, Esperanza, accomplished in the life they shared together in New Mexico and later California was thanks to their hard work and the generosity of the United States.

For the last 25 years, the Mexican government has tried to snuggle up to Mexican Americans. The old country seeks new investment dollars and the chance to leverage the connections of paisanos who were born and raised on this side of the border.

No sale. Just as Mexico once had no use for my grandfather, I now have no use for Mexico. As a Mexican American, I bleed red, white and blue. I love my country, even at moments when it doesn’t love me back.

As such, it is a sure bet that whoever is president of Mexico, that hombre will — sooner or later — get on my last nerve.

With the current officeholder — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — it was sooner. My breaking point came last week when AMLO threatened to personally “call out” U.S. members of Congress who vote against immigration reform.

In recent months, Democrats have tried to sneak in a sprinkling of reform — what we might call “reform lite” — in various pieces of legislation. The measures range from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill recently signed into law by President Joe Biden to the White House’s even more ambitious $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, which would fund efforts to combat climate change and bolster the country’s social safety net.

Among the sprinkles is a provision that would grant work permits to undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least a decade and protect those people from deportation for up to 10 years.

Congress owes the country a permanent fix to our broken immigration system. This is not that. This is merely a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.

Still, AMLO thinks this is a good idea. He’s right. It is a good idea. But what the Mexican president misses is that no one on this side of the border cares what he thinks about anything — especially immigration.

He addressed the issue at a press conference in Mexico before meeting with Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the North American Leaders’ Summit at the White House on Nov. 18.

“If legislators from one party block this initiative, we will call them out at a later time in a respectful manner,” he warned. “We will make it known from here that legislators from one party did not help something that is just and humanitarian.”

AMLO was careful to mind his manners while on U.S. soil.

He told the Mexican press that he would not repeat the threat to U.S. lawmakers — which was reported by the daily Mexican newspaper Reforma — while in the United States “out of respect for the sovereignty of that country.”

Some respect. AMLO has a lot of nerve lecturing Americans about how to take care of the same people that his country pushed north because it refused to make room for them in the Mexican economy — an economy that tends to make the rich wealthier and the poor more desperate.

At the press conference in Mexico, AMLO also asked Congress to consider the contributions and influence of Mexicans in the United States.

“U.S. legislators should not forget and our migrant brothers should be conscious that there are 38 million Mexicans in the United States,” he said.

The only way that AMLO gets to “38 million Mexicans” in the United States is if he’s counting the millions of Mexican Americans who live here — people like me. And we don’t take our marching orders from him.

If AMLO wants to protect the rights of Mexicans, and ensure they have more opportunities, the time to do all that is before they leave Mexico.