Cuba, Mexico, USA: Reflections on Immigration

“In mid-January I went back to Mexico for meetings with clients and academics, as well as colleagues from IBM. As you might imagine, the immigration debates going on in the US are being closely followed in Mexico. The people I spoke to were generally very critical of the Mexican government because it has not done nearly enough to improve economic conditions in the country so that the poor don’t feel the need to go North in search of a livelihood for them and their families. But, they also had many questions about our actions in the US. I was asked, for example, why, almost twenty years after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall – with all the ugliness it symbolized – here is the winning superpower of the Cold War planning to build a new, even bigger Berlin-style wall. Such questions caused me to reflect back on immigration, and the debates it has ignited in the US.” That is the beginning of a thoughtful post ^[1] by Cuban-American IBM Vice President Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It was linked to by the popular Mexico City-based blog ALT1040 ^[2].