New Policies Will Pay Dividends At The Border

All of this leaves room for hope that before Fox departs office on Dec. 1, relations between the U.S. and Mexico will be back to the high point they were during the first year of his administration. One encouraging indication of this is the decision last week by both governments to abandon the idea of closing the North American Development Bank, or NADBank. Its critics have referred to NADBank as the NADA Bank — the bank where nothing happened. In fact, NADBank has been a slow, somewhat cumbersome institution, and some of its work has been disappointing, mainly because of excessively tight bureaucratic procedures. However, it has also financed 90 major infrastructure projects worth more than $1.3 billion and directly benefiting more than 6 million border residents. Most of NAFTA’s drawbacks have been its omissions: it hasn’t helped solve immigration problems, it hasn’t created energy resource transfer mechanisms to cushion its downsides in each country (but particularly in the poorest of its members). As things finally begin to move forward on immigration reform, as the need for a North American energy policy becomes ever more obvious, as we move closer to the 2008 lifting of the final NAFTA tariffs on corn and beans, it is the right move to also strengthen NADBank, an institution with so much promise. http://159.54.226.83/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060405/OPINION/60404012/1049

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