As migration roils U.S., Mexico has more tempered view
BRIGHTON, Colo. — Republican activists gathered in a school lunchroom last month to hear political pitches from candidates and agreed on the top issue in the Denver suburbs these days: immigration.
The area has been disrupted by the arrival of largely Venezuelan migrants coming north through Mexico, they said. Virtually everyone in the meeting said they were uncomfortable with the new population, which has overwhelmed public services and become a flashpoint in local and national elections.
“We’ve lived here our whole lives, and now we have to pay for hotels and debit cards and health care” for the migrants, through government spending, said Toni Starner, a marketing consultant. “My daughter’s 22, and she can’t even afford to buy a house.”
Some 1,200 miles to the south, migrants are also transforming the prosperous industrial city of Monterrey, Mexico. Haitian migrants speak Creole on downtown streets, and Central American migrants ask motorists for help at intersections.
But the new arrivals aren’t even part of Mexico’s political conversation as the country gears up for its presidential vote June 2.
“If it were a problem, the politicians would already be mentioning it in their campaigns,” said Ingrid Morales, a 66-year-old retired academic who lives on Monterrey’s south side.
Every 12 years, the coincidence of presidential elections in the U.S. and Mexico provides a valuable comparative snapshot. The different ways migration is resonating in the two countries’ elections this year reflects the neighbors’ very different styles of democracy.
Mexican politics are still dominated by institutional political parties, while former President Donald Trump disrupted the United States’ two-party system with his more populist approach, and moved anti-immigration sentiment to center stage.
Mexican politics also revolve more around “bread-and-butter” issues like the economy than in the wealthier United States, which is increasingly consumed with questions of national identity, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute.
What’s more, just about every Mexican family has an experience with migration, with many still having relatives living in other countries. While migrants must travel through Mexico to enter the U.S., they are more dispersed as they travel and have not generated similar scenes of an overwhelmed Mexican side of the border.
“In Mexico, there isn’t that same perception of chaos,” Selee said.
Trump is making that perception of chaos his campaign’s main theme as he tries to return to the White House. AP VoteCast, a survey of the national electorate, found immigration was a top issue among voters in the Republican presidential primary’s initial states. An AP-NORC poll conducted last month found that 58% of Americans say immigration is an extremely or very important issue for them personally.
In contrast, Mexico’s presidential front-runner, Claudia Sheinbaum, didn’t even include a mention of immigration when she announced 100 campaign commitments last month. When she came to the state where Monterrey sits — Nuevo Leon — in February she talked about security and the water supply. Her main opponent, Xochitl Gálvez, visited the city last month and talked about her proposals to raise police salaries and combat gender violence.
But Monterrey, a three-hour drive from the Texas border, has increasingly become a critical waystation, even destination, for tens of thousands of migrants. Local authorities and international organizations have scrambled to find a place for the new arrivals.
Femsa, the owner of the ubiquitous convenience store chain Oxxo, has hired hundreds of migrants to work in its stores through a program with the United Nations refugee agency.
An annual survey of Nuevo Leon found last year that nearly nine in 10 residents noticed an increase in migrants and about seven in 10 felt that they should be provided work. It’s not as if Mexicans aren’t divided over the issue: Those surveyed in Nuevo Leon were split over whether Mexico should admit more migrants or stop the flow.
The lack of clear political advantage could explain why politicians have stayed away from talking about immigration, said Luis Mendoza Ovando, a political analyst and columnist with the main local newspaper, El Norte.
“Ultimately, society says if there are more migrants, give them work and everything is good,” he said.
Ricardo Cobián, 30, runs a beauty salon in downtown Monterrey. The next administration will have to deal with immigration but it is not a top priority for the nation, he said.
“The main issues for the candidates must be resolving security and ensuring economic stability,” said Cobián, adding that he has sympathy for migrants because he knows of his own relatives’ recent struggles to reach the U.S.
Colorado became a stop on the migrant trail even more recently than Monterrey. In late 2022, Venezuelans crossing into Texas from Mexico found that it costs less to take a bus from the border city of El Paso to Denver than many of the United States’ better-known metropolises. And Denver — a liberal, fast-growing city — offered migrants food and shelter.
Now, Denver’s mayor, Mike Johnston, reports his city of 710,000 has received nearly 40,000 migrants, what he calls the highest number of new migrants per capita of any city in the United States. The largely Venezuelan population is mainly confined to Denver but has started to trickle into surrounding suburbs like Brighton, often selling flowers or window-washes at streetcorners.