In October is when Mexico's president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum, will begin her six-year term just as U.S. voters will be preparing to determine this country's next leader.

How will the results of that race impact border security, immigration policies, and more?

That was the focus of a recent panel I got to moderate at UNLV thanks to the Brookings Foreign Policy program in partnership with Brookings Mountain West.

I think you were hinting at this, Rachel.

Perhaps you could expand.

You say "undocumented" migrants.

There are politicians who will say "illegal" aliens, "illegal" immigrants.

Explain your word choice.

(Rachel Torres) So something I think really important to note is that being undocumented in the U.S., in and of itself, is not a crime.

If you are caught, right, entering the country without authorization, certainly you will be detained, processed for deporting, right, but in and of itself, being undocumented is not a legal distinction.

Now, there's been a lot of different kind of state policies that kind of created this narrative in which we kind of think of these people as inherently, the space they operate, as being illegal.

That doesn't make it normatively true about them.

And so when I use "undocumented," what I'm referring to is the fact that we do not have them openly, kind of, communicating their presence to the U.S.

But I feel like the term "illegal" kind of implies to a certain extent that their entry was inherently illegal.

What we know is that most undocumented populations did at one point legally like enter the U.S., right?

It's also completely legal to show up at the border and claim asylum and enter that kind of plea.

And so, again, when we start talking about immigration, I think when we utilize that terminology of "illegal," we start again immediately, if you're going to think more normatively or in the humanitarian sense, we're automatically calling those populations like criminal, right?

We're associating them with that when, in reality, there's a lot of different ways in which someone finds themselves to be undocumented.

-Vanda, touching on this idea of open and closed borders, you have talked about the extension of a border wall and how effective that may or may not be.

(Vanda Felbab-Brown) Unfortunately, it's not at all effective, even though, of course, the Trump administration made it a hallmark of its policy, and it's something that a Trump 2 administration would return to.

Now, interestingly enough, we are in a situation where the Biden administration had to restart the construction of part of the wall because of congressionally mandated, appropriated money.

So when the Biden administration came in, it tried to significantly disavow the policies of the Trump administration, certainly the most egregious, brutal ones, such as separating children from their families, but a wide set of other policies.

But as the years of the administration were unfolding, a lot of the switch to the left toward the more humane, humanitarian aspects of dealing with migration turned out really challenging, not the least of which because of the highly polarized debate and the vulnerability that this created with Republican constituencies, especially as we saw a massive surge of migrants coming to the U.S. border at first, principally trying to claim asylum, overwhelming the system, and eventually, as the system became overwhelmed, many simply resorted to coming in illegally.

So part of the package of what the Biden administration tried to step away from was the construction of the wall.

But nonetheless, parts of the wall, it's really a bollard fence, were constructed during the Trump administration, and other parts had money allocated to it.

So the Biden administration tried to get a new legal judgment that would allow it to spend the money in other ways, very much within the theme, Mike, of secure border that would focus on technological surveillance at the border, for example, and certainly beefing up security in legal ports of entry.

The court denied it.

And so one of the aspects of the policy has been that parts of the construction have to be reauthorized.

But I would just broadly return to the FEMA.

What is the border supposed to do?

So the border and the wall, according to the Trump administration, was to stop the flow of undocumented migrants as well as other contraband, principally drugs.

And chunks of the border wall were constructed during the Trump administration.

Now, immediately during the Trump administration, we saw that both migrants and drugs were getting across the wall, whether people were digging tunnels underneath, bringing many more people by boat through the sea.

In the case of drugs, a wide set of technological innovations took place, including flying drugs by drones.

But anyway, the vast majority of drugs certainly enters the United States through the legal ports of entry, are smuggled by U.S. citizens with vehicles that often, majority of time, carry U.S. licenses.

So building the fence has dramatic consequences, negative consequences for the environment.

It has dramatic negative consequences for communities along the border, not the least of which are Native American communities, and does not deliver the promise of stopping the bad flows that it purports to stop.

-John, can you expand on how Mexico views these issues, immigration as well as border security and the influx of drugs from Mexico.

(John Tuman) So for a long time in Mexico, the view across many different parties--and the current governing party is Morena, National Regenerated party--and AMLO, the current outgoing president, Claudia Scheinbaum, who's the president-elect, viewed transit migration, as they call it in Mexico, from Central American countries, from other parts of Latin America, as well as migration from Mexico, they use the language and discourse of human rights that it's very important for them to protect the human rights and the rights of migrants from other countries, as well as Mexican migrants in the United States.

The reality has been that there has been increasing militarization, at least that's the way it's characterized in Mexico, of the government's response.

I mean, there are other elements to this, but there are now over 300 detention centers for migrants throughout Mexico.

They greatly expanded the-- so these are called temporary, but I think there's kind of an elastic meaning of that term.

They seem to be coming semipermanent.

They have militarized parts of the southern border.

They've tear-gassed migrants from Guatemala or people who are transiting from the Guatemalan border, for example.

There was, of course, near Juarez, a migrant detention center, a very tragic fire that killed 40 people that you may have heard about.

And that is all part of the government's response under pressure from the U.S. to really sort of ramp up enforcement and almost like a military response throughout the country.

-Something important to note is that our undocumented immigration, like immigrant population, has really grown as the result of the securitization, the militarization of the border.

So historically in the U.S., we did have migrant labor coming in from Mexico.

I would say that more Central American flows that we see now are really more related to kind of external factors along the lines of civil wars, increased cartel violence, et cetera, but also economic markets crashing.

But historically in the U.S., we had migrant labor coming in, but they were only working for short periods of time.

So they were, essentially, we saw this kind of class of young, predominantly male laborers coming to the U.S., working because their wages were a lot higher and then going back to Mexico and developing it, getting married, starting families, building up their, you know, homes.

So they had this, more of this mentality of seasonal labor.

As the U.S. has increased its militarization of the border-- and I think you're completely right, What do we mean by secure?

We have to have like a clear definition.

But militarization in the sense that we have fewer ports of entries, we're far more limited in who's allowed to come in for periods of time, the idea of immigrants being able to just come over seasonally en masse and work in our agricultural industry, I would argue, politically, a lot of people would probably be opposed that.

Historically, that's how our U.S. economy worked.

In our agricultural sector, we have sowing and harvesting times.

They would come in, work, and essentially move back.

Now, because of the securitization of the border, people have to pay more to enter this country illegally.

And so as a result, they've had to pay much higher costs.

They're like, Okay, I need to stay longer to offset that.

The longer you stay, the more you get invested in the community.

(Michael Kagan) Migration policy that's rooted in the idea that we don't want anyone to migrate, we're going to have a lot of problems.

We're going to end up inflicting a lot of cruelty.

We're going to see chaos.

We'll be at war with humanity.

I think a migration policy that accepts that migration is something human beings do, that there's nothing inherently wrong with it, that there are problems that can result related to it, but that we can solve that through having it be done orderly and in a secure way, I think then we can have a functional policy.

-John, I want to kind of take a twist here and talk about Mexico being the United States' largest trading partner.

How well understood do you think that is by the American public?

-I think there's a growing realization of the importance of Mexico for many things which we consume in the U.S.

I've been studying the auto industry since the early 1990s and for good reason, because Mexico now is-- we import.

It's our largest partner in terms of imports of cars and SUVs into the U.S. market.

It has a tremendous impact economically within Mexico.

So its contribution to manufacturing GDP in Mexico is tremendous.

It generates about a million jobs, directly or indirectly there, over 80,000 just in the vehicle assembly plants.

There are 37 plants.

There are firms there which range from Audi, Volkswagen, Nissan, Kia, Toyota, Honda, and then, of course, there's Stellantis, which people still refer to it.

It took over Chrysler in bankruptcy.

It's really a European firm, even though we call it still part of the D3, so to speak, the Detroit 3 or the legacy OEM firms, the big three in the U.S., so Ford and GM as well.

The odds are if you buy a car from, you know, in the United States, it's either produced in Mexico or it's going to have a significant share of the content from Mexico and also from Canada.

So it's a very, very highly integrated industry.

-What can individuals do to navigate the misinformation inundating social media and biased news in relation to the election and immigration policies?

Who wants-- -Throw your phone into the river.

-Mike, you want to take a shot at that one?

-If I knew how to answer that question, I would have done that already.

-Well, let me add few thoughts here.

So one, obviously, is supporting platforms that do fact checking.

So part of what I do at Brookings all the time is engaging with journalists on fact checking.

Candidate X, Y, and Z said this.

Is this true?

What's the nuance?

What's the context?

How effective that is.

And I can imagine student media doing similar kind of fact checking for Nevada, for Las Vegas, for perhaps national policies.

I would also suggest, however, encouraging peers, encouraging friends, parents to expand where they get their media, where they get news, rather.

What has been very detrimental, in my view, is the fragmentation of media, that people simply listen to only one viewpoint that they want to hear and do not get a sense of how skewed that viewpoint might be.

And major media have become very discredited or are believed to be discredited because politicians condemn them as being discredited.

Where I would be looking at is the media source that I am reading or listening to, doing fact checking.

How objective are they?

What kind of editorial standards they have?

So go read New York Times; go read Washington Post; listen to PBS, the media platforms that we grew up with and that we had significant trust and with good reason.

-Mike, you wanted to add something.

-Yeah, so American public opinion on immigration is famously divided and also ambivalent.

But there's one thing that's really consistent in opinion polls: If they ask about salience, about-- ask what are the most important issues to you, immigration is not unusual for it to come in about number two or number three, which is pretty remarkable, given that it doesn't really affect that many people so directly.

However, if you look, as I say, in the crosstabs, at who are these people who are saying immigration is such an important issue to me, they are overwhelmingly people who do not like immigrants.

-They're the ones who say, This is a big issue for me.

This motivates me politically.

And that will affect, almost as much, maybe even more so than the overall of like who favors this policy or not, like DACA, it'll affect what messages and what pressures elected officials feel.

And in some ways, it's totally healthy, right, that the people who are saying, "I am so alarmed by immigration..." are people who-- "I was in line and I heard someone speaking Spanish and my head's exploding, so I raced home and bought a red hat."

Like those kind of people.

But they will be heard by elected officials.

The other person also standing in line also heard someone speaking Spanish, didn't even notice, because it's so normal and healthy for them.

By the time they get home, they're worried about what's for dinner and don't even realize it happened.

That's healthy, but it has a political effect, because it means that the people who should be voting to, say, defend dreamers, aren't aware that the person that they're sitting with in class is under attack by some really powerful people.

And if they're ambivalent about, I don't really like anybody, I don't know if I want to vote, are not as aware of that as that person who like, Oh, my God, I heard a foreign language and someone spoke with an accent.

I'm angry about it, and that was actually two weeks ago and I'm still angry.

There are people like that, and they will be heard.

And the other, the opposite, people are actually more numerous, but it's less important to them, and that's a hard political problem to overcome.

-You can find a link to the full panel discussion at vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.