Two Nations Indivisible summary

Nowadays, lots of Mexicans live in the United States and many Americans, especially retired ones, move to Mexico to enjoy the warmer climate. This exchange makes it all the more essential for the two countries’ governments to find common ground. To their credit, the United States and Mexico have been working to improve their diplomatic ties for years.

For example, in 2009, Carlos Pascual was named the US Ambassador to Mexico. Determined to strengthen cooperation between the two nations, he and President Barack Obama traveled to the Mexican city of Guadalajara for the annual North American Leaders Summit.

Mexico’s oil industry has long been one of the country’s primary sources of wealth, which meant serious trouble in the 1980s when oil prices suddenly tanked. This market crash had far-reaching effects and produced a wave of immigration, with Mexican citizens flooding into the United States.

It all started in 1982 when Mexico’s currency, the peso, was devalued by 40 percent over the course of just a few months. As a result, Mexico couldn’t afford to pay interest on its foreign debt, which at the time amounted to $80 billion; in turn, the peso lost even more of its value.

Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI in Spanish, first came to power in 1929. The party was monopolistic, corrupt and had to use gerrymandering to maintain elected office.

So, it’s no surprise that the Mexican people eventually began protesting against this authoritarian government. This wave of protest emerged in the 1990s and, by 1994, Mexico’s expanding middle class felt utterly abandoned by the PRI as the peso crisis continued.

Immigration remains a hotly contested issue, as people from different countries and cultures often experience misunderstandings and can have trouble finding common ground. But when it comes to international economic exchange, everyone stands to benefit.

Just take the Mexican economy, which has grown more robust in large part thanks to international trade agreements. The first such agreement was the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, a deal between Canada, the United States and Mexico, which some politicians began lobbying for as early as the 1980s.

Most people know that recreational drugs are commonplace in Western countries. But the relatively harmless aspects of recreational drug use, primarily involving teenagers eating too many Cheetos, is counterbalanced by a much darker side.

Over the last 30 years, Mexico has become a major hub for drug trafficking. It used to be that the primary path by which drugs like cocaine entered the United States was from Colombia, through the Caribbean and into Miami. But in the 1980s, the United States spent billions of dollars to tighten up security along its southeast coast, effectively cutting off this route.

Have you heard about the American citizens who take it upon themselves to patrol the Mexican border? Their intention is to control the flow of immigration, but this tactic is by no means sustainable.

Instead, the United States and Mexico need to foster greater collaboration on the issue of immigration. The first thing that needs to be done is to speed up the process by which immigrant families are reunited. An easy way to do this would be to allocate family-based immigration visas to the immediate family members of naturalized US citizens.

In July of 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, which held Mexico back for so many decades, was elected president of the country. However, it quickly became clear that the party would no longer impose an authoritarian socialist regime.

In fact, the latest indicators point to a Mexico that is both democratic and prosperous. For instance, during his first year in office, Peña Nieto introduced 16 reforms, all on important issues.