Mexico’s mighty diaspora punches below its weight in elections

DURING MEXICO’S presidential election campaign in 2000, Vicente Fox, the winning candidate, rode a horse through Chicago’s Little Village neighbourhood. He wore a cowboy hat, true to his roots as a rancher in Guanajuato state. He wasn’t asking for votes—back then, Mexico’s diaspora had no voting rights—but 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 Mexico’s mighty diaspora still punches far below its electoral weight. Roughly 97% of the 12m émigrés born in Mexico reside in the United States. Yet only about 1.5m Mexicans abroad have a voter’s ID card. And of those, a paltry 227,000 have registered to vote in this year’s elections. With Claudia Sheinbaum, the ruling Morena party’s candidate, looking well set to succeed her mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the diaspora’s vote is unlikely to shift the needle.

Yet their electoral power has been growing fast. In the past century Mexican officials viewed the diaspora as traitors who had ditched their country, says Rafael Fernández de Castro of the University of California in San Diego. Mr Fox was the first candidate to see them as a resource, in part because of the billions of dollars they sent home every year in remittances. The number of registered voters abroad, while low, has risen by 25% since the last presidential election, in 2018.

This year voters can cast a ballot online, by mail or in person at 23 consulates, a third of them in California. Candidates now routinely make trips north of the border. Last year Ms Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez, her chief rival, both visited Los Angeles, where Mexicans and their descendants make up 34% of the county’s populace.

Émigrés tend to vote against the party that was in power when they left Mexico, says Tony Payan of Rice University in Houston. Because so many of them emigrated during the seven-decade reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which finally ended in 2000 with Mr Fox’s victory, the diaspora has tended to favour other parties. This should bode well for Ms Sheinbaum.

But the composition of the diaspora electorate is evolving. After a long lull in migration following the global financial crisis of 2007-09, more Mexicans are again crossing into the United States, most commonly settling in California. They may decide to vote against the leader of the country they departed, and his protégée.■

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