A quick flight to Houston last week was packed with complex news, most of it post-electoral, along with some hard words for the way that state and its communities have traditionally dealt with voters. Austin (the fastest-growing city in the United States, and Texas’ most liberal), plus Dallas and Houston, traditionally rigid Republican enclaves, along with San Antonio, went for President Obama. These are the state’s largest cities. Still, Obama lost Texas, garnering just 41.38 percent to Mitt Romney’s 57.17 percent.
Yet, a lot voters and quite a few local number crunchers see Texas becoming a swing state in 2016. “We did it!” said the manager of an outdoors/sports outlet whose family has long been resident in Texas. “A lot of people were saying that Houston would never go for Obama. And there were almost no Obama signs or placards around. But we did it.” He attributed this, as did others, to two things: A larger than ever Hispanic vote, and a vigorous campaign by students, both in Houston and Austin. Houston is possibly best known as the home of Rice University, Houston University, Baylor University, Texas Southern and Texas A&M. Austin is the home of the University of Texas at Austin, which is nationally known for its Longhorns football team, its constantly bourgeoning academic and research programs, and a student body making up the fifth largest single-campus in the nation and the largest in Texas.
While students in some southern universities often tend to reflect (without analysis) the attitudes of their parents (Old Miss students rioted the night Obama was elected president for a second term), students, especially, seem to account in good part for Austin’s rep as Texas’ most liberal city. In the past election there was a distinct contrast in those voting for Obama in different cities. Across the U.S. the Hispanic vote was larger than usual. And that is bound to grow, possibly significantly, by 2016. The same could be said of the state’s growing university population, not a little of it coming from outside the state.And if any kind of rational immigration policy is passed, it will mean an increase in Hispanic voters in Texas. Both these developments, sociologists and demographers suggest, will mean a less rigidly conservative and Republican voting base. “The GOP’s going to have to have to tone down its hatefulness, and its looniness,” said one exasperated Texas Republican. He was especially critical of the party’s “war against women,” and its poorly disguised racism. “That time is over. The Confederacy lost the war, but some people around here still can’t seem to believe it.”
Some Mexican-American residents in Texas stopped visiting “home” three or four years ago, when the drug cartel violence turned, for no direct reason, on the middle-class and people at the lower rungs of this nation’s economic ladder.
Though they seemed well informed by relatives still living in Mexico they asked about the new labor reform. In one medical waiting room, a Mexican-American lawyer asked that question, patiently waited as I said I thought President Enrique Peña Nieto’s plan to boost economic growth from four percent to six or seven percent was a dream. This simply because it is to entail bringing Mexico’s huge “informal” economy, where workers pay no taxes, into the formal economy. The extent of this underground economy is so immense that government can only roughly, very roughly, estimate it. The favorite official guess is currently about 14 million workers. And that age-old economic habit, says former International Monetary Fund official, Claudio Loser, costs Mexico from ten to 15 million dollars in lost taxes every year. (Authorities are less eager to estimate the more costly, much older and much more dangerous cultural habit of corruption – one that kept Peña Nieto’s party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI – alive and in power for 71 years.)
As soon as I paused, my interlocutor, being a lawyer, deftly launched a well-shaped description of why Peña Nieto’s plan was over-optimistic. “Well, Peña Nieto is a charlatan, a fairly practiced one,” he said, fresh from his marred term as governor of the State of Mexico, which various members of his family had ruled for decades. He had gown up in that milieu. Besides, all presidents everywhere launch their governments with clouds of euphemistic declarations and heady promises.
One of the schemes to nourish Peña Nieto’s growth plan is to bring underground workers into the formal economy. It is part of the just passed new labor law. This has been tried before but most informal workers lack the required education for the jobs Peña Nieto talks of, and they don’t like the low starting wages, or losing what they see as a certain, and pleasing amount of independence. To a great extent, informal work means that a worker – if he/she is going to generate a living wage – is usually kept to a demanding schedule simply by a generally whimsical economy applied by clients who may or may not show up. Yet the allure of being one’s “own boss” – ephemeral as it may seem to outsiders – is a strong one. The market place sets the rules, yet no one is usually telling an informal worker what to do, or when to do it. Economic circumstances play this role – often harshly.
But the Houston lawyer said that companies, labor experts, workers and, yes, lawyers, say Peña Nieto’s new law offers thin incentives for employers to hike hiring. At the same time it offers almost nothing that will draw underground workers into formal areas.
The major problem for Peña Nieto, the Houston lawyer said, is to find a convincing way that goes beyond dreams and public relations campaigns, to show many doubting Mexicans what species of PRI will rule Mexico for the next six years. The autocratic, brutal and cynically corrupt “Old PRI,” or what he claims is a “new and, finally, democratic PRI.” “Remember,” the attorney said, “the widespread buying of votes which took place in July did not in any way demonstrate a democratic election.”
The outsourcing of great production operations to China, operations which were originally established by the United States in Mexico, are in most part going to return here. The question is, said the attorney, whether Peña Nieto can capitalize on this series of opportunities. The really difficult decisions – reforms for the most part – he’ll have to make will raise a lot of hackles among his political base, meaning long-standing “vested interests.” These include the sacrosanct government-owned, labor-heavy national oil company, Pemex, and the openly corrupt leader of the nation’s teachers‘ union, as well the nation’s widely-influential corral-full of monopolies. This means taking on some of the staunchest pillars of the PRI – which got only 38 percent of the vote and therefore holds only that percentage of seats in Congress. And, unbelievably to many Mexicans as well as knowledgeable foreigners, Peña Nieto has further vowed to create an “independent” citizens’ commission on corruption. That’s seen, by the Houston attorney, who was reared in Mexico but educated in the United States, as a pure “hoax.”