RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR. THE UNION-TRIBUNE

Behind the great peso scare
January 17, 2007

Some uptight Americans are going loco over the peso. In fact, it's a real food fight.

Pizza Patron, a Dallas-based pizza chain, is accepting pesos at its 59 stores in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, California and Nevada. The gimmick is aimed at the company's clientele, which is 60 percent Hispanic. The company has received thousands of angry e-mails and even death threats.

The thinking was that folks might find themselves with a loose peso or two after trips to Mexico. So why not trade pesos for pizza? That sounds like capitalism. Everyone wants Hispanics' dinero. According to marketing experts, Fortune 500 companies spend more than $2 billion per year on advertising for a shot at nearly $800 billion in annual Hispanic spending power.

But to others, these are the hoofbeats of the Apocalypse. They worry about the dissolving of borders and the creation of a free-trade region of the Americas stretching from Alaska to Chile. It won't happen anytime soon.

That was the headline from a recent meeting between the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. The Cuban-born Gutierrez, who earned praise as the youngest CEO in the history of Kellogg Co. before joining the Bush administration in 2005, described a free-trade zone of the Americas as “a vision that will one day come to be.”

Gutierrez just doesn't think that day is here.

“I've heard statements about free-trade zones being created where we're going to have a common currency,” he said. “I think someone even had a name for the common currency.”

Yep. It was catchy: The Amero.

“Let me just say, that is not true. That is false.”

Gutierrez acknowledged that there is something called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. It involves Canada, the United States and Mexico, he said, and the goal is to improve the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Someone picked up on that and said, 'Well, this SPP is really the beginning of what will be like a European Union.' Not true. Not true. Not true. It's false.,” he said.

It's obvious what's behind the rumors.

“The way it's conveyed,” Gutierrez said, “it's almost as though it's communicated in a way that's designed to scare people. 'Look what they're going to do. They're going to eliminate borders. And people will be able to come across.' And you tie that to the immigration concern and xenophobia.”

Now we're getting to what's inside the enchilada. When I pointed out that the concern is never about dissolving our northern border but rather the one between the United States and Mexico, Gutierrez agreed. I asked him what he thought was behind the pizza-for-pesos flap.

“I think that we have been through periods like this before . . . ,” he said, “when a kind of xenophobic nationalism takes place, and we've been able to defeat it and show that these concerns aren't as detrimental as people would like to say. . . .”

Then, Gutierrez, who is the administration's point man on immigration reform, made his pitch.

“I think immigration can have an impact on that as well,” he said. “That's why it's so important to fix the immigration problem, instead of just letting it linger because, the more it lingers, the more it will impact people's viewpoint . . . and the more complicated it will get.”

Look around, Mr. Secretary. It's already complicated.

Back at the pizza parlor, what we have is a private transaction. As long as customer and merchant agree on payment for a good or service, what business is it of anyone what form it takes?

Try telling that to the critics. According to The Associated Press, a lot of the response reads like this: “This is the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico. Quit catering to the damn illegal Mexicans.”

Think about that screed. Put this guy on the couch, and you'll see that what bothers him is the fear that people are no longer catering to him – or those who look like him. That's what drives so much of the debate over illegal immigration. It's cultural displacement, or what the U.S. commerce secretary terms “xenophobic nationalism.”

Besides, who says all the people trading pesos for pizza are here illegally? All we know is that they like pizza and have pesos. It's unfair to conclude that anyone with pesos in their pocket is an illegal immigrant.

That's peso profiling. Wait. No, it isn't. That's absurd – just like the rest of the great pizza caper.

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