So That's Obama's Big Idea?

Obama's big idea: Mexican student exchanges

If that's big idea Obama can come up with to capture the imagination of the lap dog media, he must be tired. Of course, the media laps it up.

Forget all the headlines about immigration, security and drug issues during President Barack Obama's visit to Mexico last week. The most important (and least noticed) result of his trip may have dealt with an entirely different topic — student exchanges.

Sounds boring, but it's potentially the most exciting thing that came out of Obama's visit. If the bilateral plan to dramatically increase student exchanges becomes a reality, it could mark a turning point in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations, and promote the development of a vibrant North American economic bloc.

Despite the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada, the level of U.S.-Mexico academic exchanges is pathetic.

Only 13,700 Mexican students are enrolled in U.S. colleges, compared with 194,000 from China, 100,000 from India and 72,000 from South Korea, according to the "Open Doors" study of the Institute of International Education.

I somehow suspect they're deliberately excluding all the Mexican illegals who are already attending our educational institutions from their sad panda total.

Perhaps more importantly, Mexican officials say Mexico will unilaterally launch a plan before the end of the year to quadruple its current number of students in U.S. colleges over the next five years.

Mexico's under-secretary of Upper Education Fernando Serrano told me in a telephone interview that the planned publicly and privately funded scholarship program will raise to "between 40,000 and 50,000" the number of Mexican students in U.S. universities by 2017.

Note the "unilaterally double phrase". I wonder if that means they'll just point their students toward the border and tell them to claim they were here for five years and want to file under the Obama Dream executive order scheme or the new Gang of Eight immigration giveaway.