Revitalizing the Border Governor’s Conference

Shannon K. O’Neil
Council on Foreign Relations
September 27, 2011

RELATED: Click here to view an interesting photo of then-governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘Big Sis’ Napolitano and Rick Perry posing with Mexican counterparts in sunglasses and leather jackets, imitating the Terminator film Arnold starred in.

This week the Mexican state of Baja California will host the two day Border Governor’s Conference. Started nearly two decades ago, the annual meeting brings together governors from all four U.S. and six Mexican border states to discuss the issues directly affecting their states and citizens. At its height in the early 2000s, the governors and their ministers met not just with each other but also with representatives from Commerce, Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other departments and agencies to influence border-centered debates in both Washington, DC and Mexico City.

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

But in recent years the conference has fallen on hard times, a victim of polarizing politics. The 2009 session hinted at the divides, as the governors of Arizona, California and Texas failed to make it to Monterrey due to “scheduling conflicts.” It hit its nadir in 2010 in the wake of Arizona SB 1070. The Mexican governors wrote a letter calling the law “discriminatory [and] racist” and announced their plan to boycott the meeting if hosted, as planned, by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in Phoenix. Brewer cancelled the conference in retaliation. In the end, Governor Richardson of New Mexico held the meeting, but no other U.S. governors attended, leaving the future of this consultative mechanism in limbo.

The conference also has suffered from a sprawling agenda and size. With its initial successes the agenda items grew, as did the number of participants. In recent years there have been some 25 working groups on topics ranging from wildlife to science and technology. The influx of hundreds of staffer and activists has made the process much more cumbersome, and reduced the intimacy and spirit of cooperation that guided the conference in the past. Reduced in large part to the signing of agreements and photo opportunities, many governors (particularly from the United States), began skipping the event.

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