New consulate head dig deeply in the attention to the community
Head consul Alfonso Navarro-Bernachi, the Kansas City Mexican Consulate’s new lead administrator, won’t talk about the border wall or other Republican policy staples making things dicey for the Mexican nationals his office serves.
Navarro spoke last week just after the U.S.-Mexico border wall had been formally adopted in to the Republican party’s platform and seemed to be solidifying around celebrity-turned-presidential hopeful Donald Trump. He noted that it’s something his office is attentive to, but the Government of Mexico doesn’t take a stance on the decisions that are only responsibility of the US citizens.
Navarro is more interested in what he feels are the greater number of areas in which governments of Mexico and the U.S. are collaborating, partnerships that support million of jobs, he explained.
The new head consul’s evenhandedness is perhaps a product is past adversity. Among the accomplishments of Navarro’s 23 years in Mexico’s diplomacy arm — formally called “Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores” or “Secretariat of Foreign Relations” — is a stint in Arizona during the passage of SB 1070, or the “show me your papers” legislation that wholesale deputized state law enforcement officers as immigration law enforcers and forced undocumented residents to appear before the Arizona authorities as part of a formal registration under threat of criminal prosecution.
Sections of the law survived a 2012 Supreme Court challenge.
Rather than speak about the heated and potentially racial motivates surrounding the passage of the law, Navarro said he and the remainder of the Arizona consulate working under that time looked at the legislation as an opportunity to raise the visibility and access to their services, like the ability to register children of Mexican citizens as citizens themselves, a policy that appealed to a population that feared deportation or planned to return to Mexico in light of the bill.
“There, we made a great effort to meet the demands of the community,” Navarro said.
“There was much disinformation … in a climate a little complicated,” he said. “But we tried to stay ahead of that.”
In the absence of an immigration policy consequences resulting from current circumstances, post-SB 1070 Arizona and the broader national political climate “can’t be compared. For right now, it’s part of a presidential campaign,” he said. “We’re listening to what’s being said.”Highlighting the economic realities upon which the U.S.-Mexico partnership is founded — a relationship where the commercial trade across the border is $1 million dollars every minute — Navarro said it’s important that his office serve to make Mexico “more than a neighbor,” that his work is directed around positioning Mexico as a partner.
Navarro was formally installed as the lead administrator on June 20.
