| Bartley viewed Mexican workers, hungry for opportunity and ready to work, as an asset to the American economy. When the Clinton administration, with strong support from Republican nativists, went to work on a Berlinesque wall on the Califorina border, Bartley worried that the migrants would shift their routes into the desert and the number of deaths from exposure would grow. Indeed, that is precisely what happened. Bartley had no illusions about the faults of Mexico's 70-year-old one-party system. But he also recognized that an evolution was underway. He saw the 1968 massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco as Mexico's Tiananmen Square. He fully expected the economic liberalization of the Salinas government to stir a political transformation, and it did. An integrated North America was coming, whether cultural protectionists wanted it or not. Bartley put his efforts into establishing the right fundamentals.
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