The Nature of Immigration Law in Canada, Mexico, and the United States
This first issue focuses on the basic nature of immigration law in each country, providing brief synopses of the history and significance of immigration policy in each of the three nations.

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Evelyn Cruz, and Marta Villareal

The Question of North American Identity
Tackling the issue of North American Identity and its impact on policy makers and citizens alike, this second issue of the NACTS Quarterly Report considers the possibility of setting policy that takes into account a North American people and society, as well the creation of a collaborative transnational society.

Marlene Shore, Brian Gratton, and Elaine Levine

North American Freight Transportation Infrastructure
The essays in this third issue of NACTS Quarterly report examines issues of North America’s freight transportation infrastructure from several perspectives: gateways and corridors, rails and borders.

Barry Prentice, Malcolm Cairns, Juan Carlos Villa, and Mike Eskew

Labor Markets Interdependence in North America
This fourth issue of NACTS Quarterly Report addresses questions such as: How complimentary are Mexican and U.S. labor forces? Do Mexican immigrants complement U.S. workers and make the economy more competitive in the world market?

Sylvia Cote, Liliana Meza-Gonzalez, and Jim Peach

Migration Narratives and the Challenge of Crafting Public Policy...
The fifth issues of NACTS Quarterly Report attempts to uncover some of the complicated areas in the migrant experience, and shed light on the deeper social and policy issues challenging North America when dealing with immigration law practices.

Judith Alder Hellman and Celia Mancillas Bazan

Transportation and Security in North America
The final issue of NACTS Quarterly Reports examines the issue of balancing security and efficiency at ports of entry in the Unites States – regionally and sectorally.

Stephen Blank, David Randolph, Prem Gandhi, and Stephen Flynn

Newsletter June
The first issues of NACTS’s quarterly newsletter features summaries of key events and projects sponsored by NACTS, including Drivers of Change, Border Officials’ Cross, Greening North America’s Trade Corridors, and North America Post Bush.

NACTS Spring/Summer 09 Newsletter
Our third newsletter recaps our Feb. 09 DC events and explores a number of new projects and partnerships.

The Freight Transportation Sections of the SPP Reports to Leaders and the NACC Report to Ministers: An Assessment by the North American Transportation Competitiveness Research Council
As the 21st century begins, competitiveness problems in freight transportation are apparent. As UPS CEO Mike Eskew states, “What’s shocking, quite frankly, is the inability of our transportation infrastructure to keep up with the normal day-to-day stresses imposed upon it… Our highways, waterways, railroads and aviation network are simply not keeping up with ordinary demands.”

NATCRC

A Single North American Trucking Market Experiment: The Open Prairies Proposal
In this paper, a limited experiment in motor carrier cabotage in North America is proposed called “Open Prairies.” Open Prairies would allow cabotage for U.S. and Canadian motor carriers throughout the Prairie Provinces of Canada and several Upper Great Plains U.S. states. Variants of the plan are discussed that have different rules regarding permissible cabotage depending upon the previous international movement and origin or destination in the Open Prairies area. The likely costs and benefits of the scheme are examined.

Richard Beilok and Barry Prentice

A Review of Recent Research on North American Freight Transportation Infrastructure
This report analyses a dozen reports from knowledgeable groups on the infrastructure of NAFTA countries from 2003 onwards. It examines the impact of TEA funding. The referenced reports are those of a number of think tanks and industry advocates who are relatively frequent contributors to public policy debates from an evidence-based rather than ideological standpoint—organizations such as RAND, Brookings and so forth, along with government departments and industry advocates.

Guy Stanley

Managing Rail Expansion and Congestion in North American Freight Transportation: The Thruport Concept
This paper examines the critical issue in North American freight transportation of increasing congestion at key hubs and offers a suggestion for alleviating some congestion arising from inter and intra-modal transfers of containers. Adapted from a much longer article that will appear in the Journal of Transport Geography, the paper raises important and controversial issues about enhancing levels of efficiency in moving increasing numbers of containers over longer distances in the North American system.

Jean-Paul Rodrigue

Freight Transportation Infrastructure Policies in Canada, Mexico & the US: An Overview and Analysis
This paper provides an introduction to the current freight transportation infrastructure situation, an overview of the three national programs and a brief critique. It asks if these new national efforts will create the foundation for a freight transportation system that will maintain North American global competitiveness in the first decades of the 21st century.

Stephen Blank, Graham Parsons and Juan Carlos Villa

Preparing for the Future Mexican Land Bridge to the United States
By improving its ports and rail infrastructure in particular, Mexico hoped to gain a competitive advantage by attracting more trade destined for the U.S. to Mexican ports. Central to this concept was the creation of a new “land bridge” from Mexican ports to U.S. destinations.

David Randolph

Drivers of Change: Envisioning North America's Freight Transportation System in 2030
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thinking and discussion about how North America’s freight transportation infrastructure system will change over the next two decades.

Stephen Blank and Malcolm Cairns

European policy on the Rail Freight Market: Competition and Coordination
The aim of this working paper is to gain insight in European practices and strategies in the transport sector in order to see if and where lessons can be learned for the North American situation.

Drs Larissa M. van der Lugt

International trucking in the European Union: Policies and Practices
This Working Paper is the second in a series of that combines the issues of public policy and the transport market in Europe. The aim of the series is to gain insight in European practices and strategies in the transport sector in order to see if and where lessons can be learned for the North American situation.

Laura Malaguzzi Valeri

Short Sea Developments in Europe: Lessons for Canada
This Working Paper is the third in a series of that combines the issues of public policy and the transport market in Europe. The aim of the series is to gain insight in European practices and strategies in the transport sector in order to see if and where lessons can be learned for the North American context.

Mary R. Brooks and James D. Frost

Emissions Trading Systems and Transportation
This paper provides an analysis of the latest trends regarding the use of emission trading systems (ETS) to manage environmental issues such as climate change caused by transportation.

Bruno Jacques

Our Common Challenge: Meeting the Infrastructure Needs of North America
This paper serves as an overview of the infrastructure initiative cooperatively sponsored by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and the North American Center for Transborder 

North American Center for Transborder Studies and the Mexico Institute

Deep Integration Post-Bush (Editorial)
“The continent is engaged in an unprecedented political u-turn, creating new options and even larger policy challenges.”

Daniel Drache, José Luis Valdés Ugalde and Rick van Schoik

North America's Three Sided Challenge
“North America faces a raft of problems – security, immigration, transportation, development, infrastructure, energy, labor, the environment, and, not the least, a lack of institutions and a spirit of cooperation…the problem is not NAFTA, and the time for debating it is long past. The problem is that the three governments have failed to address the post-NAFTA agenda."

Robert A Pastor

Still Different
“…despite the many similarities between the two countries--from common British origins right through to a shared curiosity about who will win the Superbowl--Canadians and Americans are diverging on some very meaningful values.”

Michael Adams

The Crisis in Mexico-U.S. Bilateral Relations
“Since September 2001, the U.S.-Mexico agenda has been on hold. It has been almost eight years now, and it is not at all clear if this delay will ever be reversed, or if the trust built with such difficulty between the two countries will be recovered. Not an easy task for either nation, but it is especially difficult for Mexico, which traditionally has had to deal with nationalist, anti-U.S. sentiments that have directly influenced government decisions in recent years.”

José Luis Valdés-Ugalde

Brain Mobility
“Increasingly, US immigration policies have become a heated, at times emotionally- charged, topic in academia, media, and the politics, as well as among the general public. As the American general election looms large in eight months, the paths which immigration reform may take will not only be important in the minds of Americans, but will also have great impacts on the other two North American countries.”

Wei Li and Dan Wang

The American Poverty Trap
“Although America’s founding myth of a land of unlimited opportunities still remains a key element of the political rhetoric, the consequences of the globalization model they have struggled to impose on to others are now being felt at home. On the basis of greed and a self-pretentious attitude, the traditional scheme of promoting war in order to reinvigorate the U.S. domestic economy has proven to be ineffective.”

Silvia Núñez García

Unreliable Data
“It is difficult to argue that … the reported drop in patrimonial poverty during the 2000-2006 period is accurate. Once the figures of this period are severely challenged, the optimistic post-NAFTA view no longer holds water. Under this framework, it is necessary to evaluate the impact of NAFTA based on different sources and sets of variables such as real wages, formal employment, emigration, GDP, and private consumption, to name a few.”

Julio Boltvinik

Waking Up from The American Dream
“In the midst of today’s maelstrom regarding citizenship, national security, immigration and international labor markets, this concept of ‘equality’ is glaringly unequivocal. The U.S. project of democracy becomes one not only of policy and government, but one of differentiating the rhetoric of simple dreams from an intentional expression of pragmatic and complicated scenarios begging for courageous and engaged leadership.”

Sarah Amira De la Garza and Debra Fossum

Can the U.S. Learn Anything from Canada About Government Defecits?
“While the proximate objective is often stated as the lowest debt ratio consistent with a fully employed economy, the focus is on deficits and debts while ignoring the performance of the overall economy. It makes more sense to focus on the overall economic performance and its stability – full employment, stable inflation, viable exchange rate, and rising incomes.”

Michael McCracken

Confronting Inequality
“With the prospect of a wholesale repudiation of the deeply inegalitarian Republican legacy now very much on the US horizon, the question arises as to whether we can reverse our common slide into ever more unequal and insecure societies. Deep social and economic reform is not on the US agenda today.”

Andrew Jackson

Dealing With the Challenges of Ethnocultral Diversity
“This image of successful diversity management and harmonious integrative policy has been severely put to the test in the past two years. In the wake of a string of sensational news reports relating examples of purported abuses of the principle of accommodation of cultural and religious difference, calls to restrict manifestations of otherness in public spaces, limit the extent of socio-cultural diversity and impose on minorities stricter conditions of social integration have multiplied.”

Daniel Salée

Detriot's Demise and the Security First Agenda
“We are quickly recognizing new realities emerging from the mandates of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security since its formation in 2002…we are witnessing the steady thickening of the border on the Canadian side after a long historical period when the U.S. and Canada shared the world’s longest undefended boundary.”

Lee Rodney

Expliotation or Fair Treatment
“The political culture in Canada and governmental pro-action has resulted in a structured… beneficial program …In the U.S., government, inaction and racist public discourse has led to a criminalization of a "brown" labour force that is needed in specific sectors of the economy, whose migration was partly forced by support of U.S. administrations for murderous regimes in Latin America, and whose migration intensity is increased by NAFTA-framed exports of agricultural products.”

Dirk Hoerder

No Documents, No Entry
“In theory, the model of border management should be one of cooperation and close coordination…Given the magnitude of the new procedures and the volume of work for Canadian and US border officials on the northern border, the questions are, are the existing financial resources adequate to cope with the intensity of these changes? … Do Ottawa and Washington have a full-fledged management strategy to address the legal and administrative challenges that will inevitably arise?”

Daniel Drache

North America's Forgotten Agenda
“North America can scarcely rise with the “tide” if Mexico remains impoverished…What happened to the conversation about developing the poorest parts of Mexico (the central and southern states)? Where is the policy discussion, or the public debate, and how do the two overlap and interact?”

D. Rick Van Schoik and Erik Lee

The Future of North American Integration Post-Bush
“The solution to this regional conundrum is to recreate the original NAFTA proposal…Taken as a whole, this would be a practical policy to solve a tandem of regional problems: production would be encouraged to return to North America, with Mexico as its preferred low-cost alternative site.”

Monica Gambrill

Happy Third Birthday to the SPP! But Will there Be a Fourth?
“The unwillingness of officials to vigorously defend NAFTA, or make the case for the SPP, has largely ceded the intellectual and political debate over the merits of cooperation and liberalization in North America to xenophobes who fear fictitious Superhighways…If the SPP is going to celebrate its fourth and fifth birthdays, North America’s leadership needs to begin the transformation of the debate in New Orleans.”

Greg Anderson

Mexico's National Security Equation
“Harmonizing the internal and external security agendas means that Mexico suffers relatively frequently from domestic ―and sometimes external― political frictions with different stakeholders.”

Leonardo Curzio

The Immigration Debacle
“In the middle of this rancorous immigration debate and almost a year after the immigration reform failure, most lawmakers at Congress are discussing different measures to improve border security and the enforcement of immigration laws…More than ever before, U.S. Citizens of Mexican origin have an opportunity to make their vote count, and support a candidate who would try to really push “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” including more visas and a path to legalization.”

Mónica Verea

The Unwelcoming Nation
“The costs of tolerant immigration policy are diffuse, felt indirectly in lower wages for workers and increased taxes to pay for the public services that immigrants use, and directly by the cultural threat in every society into which immigrants arrive.”

Brian Gratton and Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan

Knowingly Employing Sanctions
“It has become clear that the timing of the [Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA)] in conjunction with the deepening housing problems, the apparent recession, budget deficits, lower than expected retail revenues in the last quarter of 2007, and related problems in the state economy, has created a difficult economic and political scenario…What is less clear is how the acrimonious debate on the impact of migrants will be negotiated between the contradictory positions.”

Luis F.B. Plascencia

Chain Link Fences and Border Security
“Every time the United States enters some form of recession, “illegal” movements by people or goods across U.S. national borders surge to national attention, while the underlying structural reasons for the economic decline are seldom discussed…Perhaps we have now arrived at a time when the United States is no longer able to disguise its fall from sole superpower status through a focus on supposed external threats to the U.S. nation, such as terrorism, undocumented immigration, and smuggling, against which national borders need to be fortified.”

Claudia Sadowski-Smith

The Anti Immigrant Backlash Post 9/11
“The move towards harsher restrictions against immigration at federal and state levels have reinforced the notion that US citizenship is limited to a white-monolingual monocultural standard…a consistent pattern of policies are being implemented that will assure the complete exclusion of immigrants from mainstream America.”

Mary Romero

North American Integration Post Bush
“The vast majority of decision-makers realize of course that it is an illusion to think that one could return to a pre-NAFTA world or, more specifically, that lost jobs would return if we tried to abrogate that agreement. What, then, is the future of the mutually beneficial North American economic integration that the NAFTA was meant to herald?”

Daniel Schwanen

Security, Civil Liberties and the 2008 U.S. Election
“Canadians, predominantly pro-Democratic, are fascinated with the larger than life Obama-Clinton struggle. But what are the implications for the North American security agenda that Canada will face after the November elections?”

RegWhitaker

The Long Road of Transportation Post Bush
“As the Bush Administration draws to a close, issues involving the U. S. transportation system, especially for freight transportation, still need to be addressed…
In this article, I hope to give readers an idea of the various crosscurrents that are likely to frame the continuing debates about industry regulation and structure, infrastructure, and resource allocation that are the heart of the question about how to maintain and upgrade the U. S. transportation network that supports the nation’s commerce.”

Arnold Maltz

The More Things Stay the Same
“The 2008 U.S. electoral process may open up the possibility of renegotiating the tone of relations between the two countries’ chief executives and perhaps of reviewing a few isolated issues. However, the general dynamic of a relationship as complex as this will not change substantively no matter who wins in November.”

Patricia de los Rios Lozano

The Passion of NAFTA
“According to experts assessing NAFTA’s future, the next step in the integration process would be to unify commercial and monetary policies, which means to establish a Customs Union and to adopt a common currency…In the case of Mexico the next logical step would be to fill up the missing part in NAFTA regarding free factors mobility, which is a migration agreement…In the US, most politicians seem to endorse the workers organizations’ claim to revise NAFTA, believing that the lack of jobs comes from the US trade deficit with Mexico.”

Pablo Ruiz-Nápoles

Red, White, Blue and Green: High Politics
“There is no doubt that with the end of Bush’s presidency, there will be some federal action on climate change...Since climate change is linked to international reputation, it is important for the future President of the United States to foster a favorable atmosphere with a focus on environmental action and solidarity with developing countries.”

Edit Antal

Renewing the Border Partnership
“After a decade of integration and cooperation, communities along the U.S.-Mexico border are facing contradictory times…while border communities have accumulated important social capital in the form of collaboration and binational visioning, post 9/11 policies are reinstating the barriers that in the past made transborder planning impractical.”

Francisco Lara Valencia

The "Goracle" Factor
“We are beginning to see the emergence of a “culture of sustainability” … coinciding with the current UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development…While there is still a gap between public attitudes and behaviour, this third wave of public support for the environment and sustainability may change the landscape of politics and public policy for the foreseeable future.”

David V.J. Bell

Border Officials' Cross Talk 2008: Proceedings, Findings and Recommendations
How can the three nations and other “states” find meaningful and sustainable ways to identify, develop, preserve, rotect, operate, inspect, and/or accommodate the common assets, resources, and natural systems that, necessarily, will ontinue to be controlled by the sovereign regime, yet at the same time, clearly exist across borders?

North American Center for Transborder Studies

Border Officials' Cross Talk 2008: Framing Papers
Nine framing papers written by academics frame the issues presented and discussed at the Cross Talk.

Rick Van Schoik, Daniel Drache, Abigail Friedman, Greg Anderson, Kimberly Collins, Subhrajit Guhathakurta, David Pijawka, Sergio Peña, and Edward Sadalla, Christopher Brown, Lee Rodney, Francisco Lara

Crossing Borders: Connecting City and Ecology in Downtown Nogales
The citizens of Nogales have determined to keep the Centro as the core of the city’s urban fabric. This decision, communicated to the Capstone Studio of the School of Planning at Arizona State University in the spring of 2008, has energized faculty and students to contribute time and creativity in assisting the City of Nogales to develop a vision to restore and bring new vitality to downtown Nogales by transforming the district into an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable urban space, and envision strategies to engage citizens, businesses owners, land owners, and municipal authorities in a collaborative effort to maintain the downtown area as the core of a diversified and prosperous city of Nogales.

ASU College of Design