Until we have a legitimate labor market between Mexico and the United States, people will attempt to come here to work.

The image and the costs of a Berlin-like wall or a Great Wall of China is something that the American people have not accepted to date.

Every air traveler entering Mexico is vetted against US databases. The air passenger screening system Mexico has in place involves these checks against US national security and criminal data bases. There are plainclothes US officers stationed at airports in Mexico working with Mexican immigration officials to protect the United States. This joint security program has been in place for at least six years and is a huge asset.

Mexico has become a robust democracy with a robust press and an active legislature. It has gone from being a sending country for migrants to a transit country, and increasingly a receiving country for migrants in its own right.

I think there's no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border. But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.

Mexico now has the 13th largest economy in the world. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts it will have a larger economy than Germany by 2042.

We have to remember that information sharing is restricted by legal barriers and cultural barriers and by the notion that information is power and therefore should be hoarded so if you share information you can extract something in exchange. In today's digital online world, those who don't share information will be isolated and left behind. We need the data of other countries to connect the dots.