Still No Border Solution

It’s the middle of 2010, but the United States government is still failing to live up to its commitments under a 1994 treaty to open the border between here and Mexico to truck traffic.

Hopes for a settlement of this long-contentious issue had been raised recently by comments from the Obama administration that indicated a solution was in the offing. But it was not to be.

The most positive words about the subject came last week from Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon when he told reporters during his state visit that he was confident progress soon would be made. (Click here for p.1 story, this week’s issue.)

President Calderon diplomatically stated that he and President Obama had “talked about the different obstacles that are there for complying with transportation obligations that have been established” under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Actually, most of those “obstacles” come from Congress, which has bowed to the pressure of some elements of organized labor to stall the border opening, citing safety concerns, but apparently really worried that the opening could lead to a flood of lower-paid Mexican drivers across the border.

The NAFTA provision was designed to increase the speed and lower the cost of cross-border freight movements between the two large trading partners.

Fact is, the $2.4 billion a year in punitive tariffs that Mexico has applied to a list of U.S. products has done a great deal of economic harm to American producers and to the U.S. fleets that had been delivering the goods now priced out of the Mexican market by the tariffs.

Earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a Senate subcommittee that a plan to resolve the border issue was “closer than soon.” This led some observers to anticipate that President Obama would use President Calderon’s visit to unveil his new solution.

What we got instead were only the words of President Calderon: “We shall work in order to achieve a quick solution with a constructive, creative solution in the long term in this and many other areas.”

It’s hard to tell if President Calderon was being polite or ironic in his assessment. But it’s easy to see that the time has definitely come for the United States to honor its treaty obligations and open the border to Mexican trucks and fleets that meet U.S. standards and obey U.S. rules and regulations.