I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The governors of the four U.S. southern border states will join their counterparts from the northern states of Mexico in a conference to be held in Ensenada, Baja California. Gov. Susana Martinez will serve as vice-chair of the conference, which will focus on economic development, border security, education and other issues.
Shannon K. O’Neil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that in the early 2000s the conference would bring together not only the governors but representatives from many different U.S. and Mexican government agencies. In recent years, however, the conference has lost much of its prominence due to political disputes between both countries’ governors:
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.
Currently, three of the U.S. border governors — Martinez, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and Texas Gov. Rick Perry–are Republicans, and California Gov. Jerry Brown is a Democrat. Brewer, who endorsed and has become the most prominent national defender of the state’s immigration law S.B. 1070, has said she will attend this year’s conference, but Perry, whose relatively moderate history on immigration issues has been criticized by his Republican rivals in the ongoing presidential primary, has yet to say if he will attend.
