MEXICO CITY (CN) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will meet with President Joe Biden at the White House Tuesday amid heightened tensions in the relationship between the two countries.
The meeting comes a month after López Obrador snubbed the United States’ invitation to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, citing the exclusion of the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from the event.
They will discus topics such as immigration, inflation, drug trafficking and energy security, issues in which López Obrador feels like he has leverage, according to Martha Bárcena, who served as Mexico’s Ambassador to the United States from 2018 to 2021.
“He will try to play with the limits that he has in the relationship with the U.S.,” she said in a webinar hosted by the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute on Monday.
The Mexican president will have to walk a fine line between asserting his administration’s goals and recognizing what the U.S. government expects of him.
“This is the most important part of the visit: he has to understand, from the highest level in the U.S., what are the limits the U.S. is seeing in the relationship,” said Bárcena.
One area where López Obrador feels he can test those limits is with immigration. Seeing Biden under increasing pressure from Republicans to take action on illegal immigration ahead of the midterm elections in November, the Mexican president sees an opportunity for both countries to benefit from changes to how the U.S. accepts migrants.
“They don’t have workers, but they don’t want to accept it, and for a long time they’ve bet on the illegality for two reasons: because they can pay less and not give [undocumented migrant] workers benefits, and because they can fire them whenever they want because they’re considered illegal,” López Obrador said in a press conference last week.
“So this is what we’ve got to deal with and say, ‘Look, are we keep this up or are we going to sort out the flow of migrants?’” he said.
This past month, Interior Secretary Adán Augusto López said the United States had committed to issuing 300,000 temporary work visas to Mexican and Central American citizens “to help lower the tension” of the immigration issue.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told Courthouse News that the U.S. government made no such commitment, despite Secretary López’s claim that an official announcement of the visas would come out of Tuesday’s meeting.
While the optics of the political situation in the United States clearly demonstrate how López Obrador has an advantage in terms of immigration, there are other issues in which he may be taking more liberties than circumstances actually allow.
Bárcena said that López Obrador feels that the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) gives him “free rein” to reform Mexico’s energy sector as he sees fit.
“There were several of us that explained to him that there were other chapters of the USMCA that could be violated by the measures that his government was taking on energy,” she said.
López Obrador has said that he plans to end all oil exports by 2023, and his electricity reform has been highly controversial. A Supreme Court ruling on the reform in April led many to question the independence of Mexico’s highest tribunal.
But experts say Biden doesn’t have much room to talk to Mexico about judicial autonomy given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent shift to the right.
“It wouldn’t be easy for Biden, because the U.S. Supreme Court is very politicized,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, in a phone interview.
“So he is in a weak position to talk about checks and balances,” Fernández said, pointing to recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on abortion and environmental regulations. “It’s telling us that the U.S. also has problems with its own Supreme Court.”
Others contend that the specific agenda items aren’t really the point, at least not for López Obrador.
“To think that discussing the bilateral agenda is AMLO’s main objective would be a little bit naive,” said Viridiana Ríos, a U.S.-Mexico politics professor at Harvard Summer School, using the colloquial acronym by which López Obrador is known in Mexico.
“If AMLO has the desire to visit Washington, it is more because of a second objective, which is related to his own agenda, as always,” Ríos said in the Mexico Institute’s webinar.
That agenda is the upkeep of his image in the region. López Obrador wants to show the region and the world that he is “the unique and truthful regional leader of Latin America,” said Ríos.
“This meeting is a performance, but it’s not a performance for the Mexican public, it’s not a performance for Washington’s diplomacy, it is a performance for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other Latin American countries to confirm the power that Mexico or, most importantly, López Obrador can have as a leader of the region,” she said.
López Obrador has said on several occasions that he wants to form a Latin American union similar to the European Union, but has not specified what such an organization would look like or how it would operate.
The Mexican president is playing a delicate game after months of instigating, even going so far as to call for the dismantling of the Statue of Liberty if Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is extradited to the United States, according to Luis Rubio, chairman of the Mexican think tank México Evalúa.
“This strategy is extraordinarily risky for the president and for Mexico,” Rubio said, “because he is disregarding the fact that he is dealing with Mexico’s most important relationship and the world superpower.”
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