US-Latin American Relations

NDN/NPI is pleased to announce that Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, will be coming to NDN on Monday, June 28th to deliver remarks about the current state of US-Latin American relations.

The event will begin promptly at 2pm, and end at 3pm.  After his remarks the Assistant Secretary will take questions from the audience at NDN and on-line.

To attend the event or to watch the event online, please RSVP.  We look forward to seeing you on the 28th.

The always interesting Julia Preston has an insightful piece in the NYTimes today about efforts to ensure Latino  participation in the upcoming census.  It includes a reference to recent NDN work spearheaded by Andres Ramirez:

Nearly 12 million Latinos voted in November 2008, an increase of two million votes over 2004, according to an analysis by Andres Ramirez, a researcher at NDN, a Democratic advocacy organization. Now, in the first census since Hispanics passed blacks to become the second-largest population group in the United States, Hispanics want to extend that voting power with a census count that would support more elected representatives for their communities.

An analysis by NDN and America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, projected that a full count of Hispanics would lead to a significant redrawing of the Congressional map, with six states picking up one Congressional seat (Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah), while Arizona would add two and Texas as many as four.

For the US Latino community the next three years will be of great consequence.  We will see the census, the passage of immigration reform and the 2011/2012 reapportionment at the federal and state levels.   If each happen as they should, as Andres' reports above show, there will be a significant shift of political power in the US to states and parts of states with fast-growing Latinos populations, the beginning of a more proper alignment of the actual number of Hispanics in the US with their political representation at all levels of government.  For Hispanic leaders making sure that all three of these game-changing events happen, and happen as they should, is both a great opportunity and great challenge in the years ahead. 

For many years NDN and our affiliate the New Policy Institute has worked to make sure that the extraordinary demographic transition underweigh in the US today both better understood and for it to play out with the least amount of social strife possible.  Which was what drove us this year to not only aggressively champion comprehensive immigration reform and the nomination of Sonio Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, advocate for closer Hemispheric ties and relations with our Latin neighbors, produce the reports cited above, but to also lead the successful campaigns to get CNN to drop Lou Dobbs and to defeat the pernicious Vitter-Bennett amendment in the US Senate which would have done so much to disrupt the census next year.

In looking back at our work these last few years I think this work - helping ease and enable the extraordinary demographic transition underway in the US - has been our most important and lasting contribution to the national political debate.  I am grateful for all the support the NDN community has given us - the whole NDN team - to lead on these basket of issues which have often been hard and sometimes not well understood.  But led we have, with moral clarity and bull-headed conviction, and the I would like to believe that the nation is just a little better for it. 

But the battles ahead may be our most important yet.  Get ready my friends.

Update - Here is the redistricting report cited above.

Miami - My trip to Chile for the Progressive Goverance Conference was my first trip outside the US since Barack Obama's Inaugration.  I was eager to assess the perception of America in these early days after the terrible Bush Presidency.   I offer some initial impressions from my layover in Miami on the way back to DC: 

The Rest Has Risen, and Want a Seat at the Table - From the end of World War II on America's principal export was our governing model, which I characterize as a committment to democracy, free markets,personal liberty and the rule of law.  With the exception of the Middle East, most regions, governments and people of the world are in the process of adapting some version of this model, of course with varying degrees of success.  The embrace of this model, and what might even be called modernity itself, has helped dozens of countries in eastern Europe and the developing world achieve remarkable growth and societal stability and progress.  To paraphrase Fareed Zakaria, we are witnessing a dramatic rise of the rest, something that FDR and Truman I'm sure dreamed of when they constructed the global architecture that has been so instrumental in ushering in this new era.  And for any American who has traveled to these rising regions in recent years it is an exciting thing to behold.  

But this also means-- and I'm not sure American policy elites have really come to terms with this-- that the management of this global architecture is going to have to change to accomodate these new rising powers.  This sentiment is often voiced in policy circles, but how we actually change organizations like the UN, the World Bank and the IMF - and even make meetings like the G20 less a photo-op and more an actual exchange of ideas among diverse peers - is going to be a true test of America and the Obama Administration.  The days of US-European global leadership are over, and the longer global institutions maintain these overt or implicit arrangements, the less relevant these institutions will be to the rising nations who want - and deserve - a seat at the global table.  

Exporting Chaos -The global financial and economic crisis will end up hastening this new  day in global relations.  What I heard in Chile again and again was that the crisis was an Anglo-American export.  That due to our own recklessness, economic hardship had been exported to a rapidly improving world.  For Americans, this sentiment coming on the heels of Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, leaving many to wonder why our great nation which had for so long exported stability, prosperity and modernity was now in the business of exporting chaos.

Prior to my trip to Chile I had assumed that the American people's utter repudiation of the Republican Party, and their choice of a young inspiring leader would help America regain its proper place as the indispensible nation, the moral, economic and political leader of the world.  But now I am not so sure.  First I'm not so sure the rising powers of the world want to return to a world with a paramount sole superpower.  Their goal is to create a much more multi-polar, distributed and arguably democratic set of power arrangements.  This line of thinking may believe that for America to strongly re-assert itself now could very well block the necessary changes which can result in giving these rising powers a bigger seat at the table, gaining the respect and recognition they want and deserve.  

Second, I think many countries, while admiring of our new President, have a right to wonder about what has happened to that old and virtuous America of previous eras.  The America of this past decade has been a blundering reckless superpower, launching a wildly aggressive invasion of another nation, condoning torture, borrowing and spending imprudently, blocking meaningful action on climate change and now exporting a global economic crisis that is doing significant harm to virtually every society in the world.   The performance of America in the Bush era has rightly given many in the world pause, and there simply is no interest in having that America return to power.  At the G20 and the Summit of the Americas, Barack Obama will confront this new global reality, rising powers deeply skeptical of what America has become, hopeful perhaps about this new President, but no longer content to simply blindly accept the Pax Americana that has governed the world for over 60 years.  

At the end of WWII the American government adopted a strategy to defeat totalitarianism and help the decimated and developing world prosper.  We are today seeing the triumph of that strategy, as an overwhelming majority of nations have chosen a modern path and have seen their people lift themselves up.  But now that they have, a great deal of imagination and hard work will be required to design the next series of strategies to help us manage the affairs of the world, building upon what has been a remarkable era of global progress.  That era will almost certainly see a decrease in American power, something that will be terribly difficult for this nation to accept.  Add this new set of daunting global realities to the already significant set of challenges inherited by our remarkable new President, Barack Obama.

Vina Del Mar, Chile - This week marks a very intense period of US engagement with Latin America.  Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico for two days.  Vice President Biden has been holding bi-lateral meetings here in Chile attending the Progressive Goverance Conference, and participated in a wide ranging 3 1-2 hour discussion this morning with the leaders of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay (and Britain).  Tomorrow he meets with a group of Central American leaders in Costa Rica.  He offered this op-ed about our relations with the region in anticipation of this trip.  And then in mid April comes the Summit of the Americas, what will be one of the more important regional gatherings of the modern era. 

For seven years NDN has been making the argument that closer hemispheric relations was a political necessity in the 21st century.   America now has the 3rd largest Hispanic population of all the nations in the Americas, bringing us closer to the culture, language and people of the region than any time in our history.  Our identity is this emerging century will have an increasingly Latin flavor, and it will force our government to be more concerned than it has ever been with maintaining strong relations with our neighbors to the South.  

Even more importantly Latin America has been experiencing an exciting period of sustained prosperity and stable, democratically-elected governments. The region has made tremendous strides in throwing off ideological and political shackles that have held Latin America back for decades.  America needs to acknowledge this progress much more openly, and begin to treat the countries and people of Latin America as what they are truly are now today - brothers, neighbors, collaborators, partners, friends. 

This week the new Obama Administration has sent a very clear signal that it desires a new day in US-Latin American relations.  The leaders here at the Progressive Goverance conference have taken note of this attention, this respect, and I think in this extraordinary first 100 days of the Obama Presidency, the decision to engage decisively with this region this quickly is one of the most important decisions our new President has made - and one we talked about a great deal at our compelling forum previewing the Summit of the Americas this past Thursday. 

It has been exciting be have been a part of this great conference.  Once again kudos to Policy Network for pulling off a remarkable event.

I'm checking in from Vina Del Mar, Chile, where I am attending a terrific conference put on by the Policy Network, a British think tank. It is an impressive gathering of leaders and thinkers from Europe and the Americas. Today we will be hearing from Vice President Biden, Chilean President Bachelet, Brazilian President Lula, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and many, many others. I will be a respondent on an economic break out panel later today. 

For those interested, you will be able to watch some of the proceedings live today at the conference site. Be sure to check out their handbook of ideas, "Responses to the Global Crisis: Charting a Progressive Path," which contains a series of thoughtful essays from European, American and Latin American authors on where we go from here. 

First impressions: people here have great hopes for our young President. There is a powerful sense that we are entering a whole new era of politics, one unlike what has come before. There is fear that there are still very tough days ahead in the current economic crisis. And, as there is an ever greater sense that we, the people and the countries of the world, are all in this together as never before, we need to create more forums, more venues like this to connect current and future leaders of our nations to better able learn from one another, create friendships and partnerships, and to model the kind of global cooperation we all are advocating -- and believe is necessary -- to tackle the emerging global challenges of the early 21st century. 

Kudos to Policy Network for putting on a great event, and I hope to check in again a little later.