Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, met with the Los Angeles Times for more than an hour while visiting California in November. He was eager to talk up the celebrations surrounding the U.S.-Mexico diplomacy bicentennial. We were eager to talk about the border. The pas de deux featured a lot of platitudes, a couple of tense moments, and a number I can't shake: 13,000.
That was the estimate Salazar gave for the number of Mexicans who were studying at our universities at the time. Many of us were surprised to hear it was so low. We've been friends with Mexico for 200 years, and that's all our diplomacy could muster? By comparison, our geopolitical adversary China had north of 300,000 on our campuses.
The reason for the gap between the two nations is obvious: Chinese students bring in an estimated $15 billion to the economy each year. Mexico's economy is robust — the 15th largest in the world — but China is second only to the U.S. Apparently that number matters more than those 200 years.
