Pena Nieto Confident 75-Year Pemex Oil Monopoly to End This Year

Bloomberg, 6/18/2013

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he’s confident Congress will end the state oil monopoly this year, opening the way for companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc to tap the nation’s reserves. In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos would develop some fields, while others are tapped by foreign and private companies. He declined to discuss more details of the proposal, or whether it would require a change in the constitution.

Seven decades after his party seized fields from the predecessors to Exxon and Shell, Pena Nieto is preparing for the return of international oil companies to arrest eight years of decline in crude output. An opening would probably be broad, from offshore drilling to shale fields similar to those that have revived the U.S. petroleum industry, Pena Nieto said. “It’s obvious that Pemex doesn’t have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation,” the 46-year-old president said in an interview in London yesterday, before traveling to Northern Ireland for meetings with Group of Eight leaders. “Shale is one of the areas where there’s room for private companies, but not the only one.”

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Mexico in Talks to Open Energy Sector to Private Investors

The Wall Street Journal, 6/17/2013

President Enrique Peña Nieto will seek in the coming months to end a taboo of nearly eight decades by opening the state-run oil and gas industry to private investment and competition, a move the government hopes will attract billions of dollars in investment. Mr. Peña Nieto’s government wants to allow private energy firms to share the risks involved in developing increasingly complex energy reserves such as deep water oil deposits by letting them produce oil and gas through profit-sharing deals, according to three high-level government and ruling party officials who gave details of the proposed reform for the first time.

The proposal, which would involve amending several articles of Mexico’s Constitution, will need two-thirds support from Mexico’s Congress. But officials say they are optimistic that they can get at least one of the two main opposition parties to back the plan without drastic changes. Formal negotiations will likely start after local elections on July 7, with a bill presented to Congress as early as August, the officials said.

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Pena Nieto Plans End to 75 Year Pemex Monopoly in Oil Production

Bloomberg, 6/17/2013

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he’s negotiating support to break the state monopoly over oil and gas exploration and production this year to accelerate economic growth. In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos would develop certain fields, with others being tapped by foreign and private companies. He declined to discuss details of the proposal, or whether it would require a change in the constitution.

Seven decades after his party seized fields from the predecessors to Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Pena Nieto is preparing for the return of international oil companies to arrest eight years of decline in crude output. An opening would probably be broad, from offshore drilling to shale fields similar to those that have revived the U.S. petroleum industry, Pena Nieto said. “It’s obvious that Pemex doesn’t have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation,” the 46-year-old president said in an interview in London today, before traveling to Northern Ireland for meetings with Group of Eight leaders. “Shale is one of the areas where there’s room for private companies, but not the only one.”

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Op-ed: Immigration Reform — The Time for Free Trade

By Benjamin Powell, The Huffington Post, 6/16/2013

Consideration of the “gang of eight” proposal in the U.S. Senate has rekindled the national discussion about immigration reform and it’s high time that this discussion emphasizes a thorough understanding of the economic case for free trade in labor. A cursory understanding of recent history demonstrates that relatively free trade has lifted great masses of people out of poverty worldwide. The United States boasts a long record of relatively free trade and has always benefited from being essentially one big “free trade zone” internally. Goods and services, capital, and labor all move without governmental restriction throughout the nearly four million square miles of the United States.

Interference with the free flow of trade has always occurred along the arbitrary lines politicians have drawn on the map. During the 19th century, tariffs and other barriers restricted international trade in goods and services. However, for the most part, labor was free to enter or leave the United States. Following World War I, the federal government enacted a series of laws restricting immigration. The interwar years also witnessed significant restrictions on trade in goods and services.

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Mexico Moves to Convert More Long-Distance Calls to Local

Bloomberg, 6/13/2013

Mexican regulators made progress on a plan to redefine area codes so that phone carriers such as America Movil SAB have to charge local prices instead of heftier long-distance fees. The decision would cut the number of area codes to 172 from 397, the Federal Telecommunications Commission said today in a statement. The agency altered and resubmitted the plan to the Federal Commission for Regulatory Improvement, which must sign off on it before it can become official.

Mexican officials have been seeking to reduce area codes for several years, meeting opposition from America Movil, which said previous plans were designed to favor its competitors. The phone agency is running out of time to implement the plan because it is due to be replaced by a new government body under a law signed this week by President Enrique Pena Nieto.

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Op-ed: This immigration reform bill isn’t a ‘Latino issue’, it’s an American one

By Michael Ramos-Lynch, The Guardian, 6/13/2013

The senate’s vote on Tuesday to debate the immigration plan pushed forward by the “Gang of Eight” is a small step in the right direction. But I’m worried it won’t pass, mainly because we can’t seem to get past the same misleading rhetoric that consistently accompanies the general conversation on immigration in this country.

As both a former high school teacher with a large number of undocumented students in my classroom and as a proud Mexican-American born in Texas whose mother was born in Mexico City, I’m fearful that this legislation will get lost in a false debate – that it will get packaged as simply a “Latino issue”. I’m nervous that Republicans who are considering supporting this legislation are mainly driven by the growing number and consequent voting power of Latinos. This isn’t a “Latino issue” or an “immigrant issue” – it’s an American one.

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Immigrants: Let them drive

The Economist, 6/15/2013

As the Senate voted this week to allow debate on comprehensive immigration reform, several states are pondering a narrower problem. Until this year illegal immigrants could not legally drive except in New Mexico, Utah and Washington state. So they typically drive without lessons, testing or insurance.

This is dangerous: unlicensed drivers are almost five times more likely to be in a fatal crash. They are also less likely to stay at accident scenes, according to Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organisation. The costs of accidents involving the uninsured are passed on to other motorists in the form of higher insurance premiums.

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Conservatives on Immigration: Reformers in Name Only?

The Atlantic, 6/12/2013

When it comes to immigration reform, Senator Rand Paul says he is only trying to help. Should immigration-reform advocates believe him? On Wednesday, Paul, the Tea Party Republican from Kentucky, stood before a phalanx of cameras and microphones in a Capitol Hill hotel where he’d just given a speech. “I want to vote for immigration reform,” he told the group of reporters. But in order to meet his standards, the bill needed some changes, such as putting it in the hands of Congress to judge whether the border was sufficiently secure.

A number of conservative politicians are using a version of this line. They say they support immigration reform in the abstract, but in practice, the legislation is never good enough. As the immigration debate opened in the Senate on Wednesday, this was the major question facing the bill’s proponents: make the bill more conservative to meet this group’s demands? Or refuse, on the grounds that these right-wingers are never going to support the final bill anyway?

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Immigration Costs Are Overstated, Study Finds

The New York Times, 6/13/2013

Public debate about immigration is being distorted by unfounded concerns over the financial burden that new arrivals put on governments, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report Thursday. Across the developed world, “the fiscal impact of immigration is close to zero,” the organization said in the report, which compares the costs of immigration internationally. “The current impact of the cumulative waves of migration that arrived over the past 50 years is just not that large,” it added, “whether on the positive or negative side.”

The O.E.C.D., which is based in Paris, noted that over the decade 2001-2011, immigration was responsible for 40 percent of the population growth in member countries. Nevertheless, that inflow was usually almost irrelevant to overall public expenditures relative to gross domestic product — “generally not exceeding 0.5 percent of G.D.P. in either positive or negative terms” — as the largest costs to government, like those from military spending, are unaffected by immigration. “Immigrants contribute more in tax and social contributions than they get in individual benefits,” said Jean-Christophe Dumont, the O.E.C.D. official who headed the study. “That’s why the net fiscal impact is mostly positive.”

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