Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 30, 2024

DURING MEXICOS presidential election campaign in 2000, Vicente Fox, the winning candidate, rode a horse through Chicagos Little Village neighbourhood. He wore a cowboy hat, true to his roots as a rancher in Guanajuato state. He wasnt asking for votesback then, Mexicos diaspora had no voting rightsbut he distributed phone cards and told Chicagoans to ring their families in Mexico and tell them to vote for him. Members of the diaspora were enfranchised in 2005. On June 2nd they will vote in record numbers.

Yet Mexicos mighty diaspora still punches far below its electoral weight. Roughly 97% of the 12m migrs born in Mexico reside in the United States. Yet only about 1.5m Mexicans abroad have a voters ID card. And of those, a paltry 227,000 have registered to vote in this years elections. With Claudia Sheinbaum, the ruling Morena partys candidate, looking well set to succeed her mentor, President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, the diasporas vote is unlikely to shift the needle.

Link:

Mexico's mighty diaspora punches below its weight in elections - The Economist

Category: Diaspora
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