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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2006 
Mexican Government Applauds US Senate Action on Immigration
 E. Eduardo Castillo - Associated Press
| | A group of Mexican deported migrants enter the immigration offices in Las Palomas, Mexico near the New Mexico border. Mexico remains optimistic that the immigration bill in the U.S. Congress can be transformed into something that will ultimately benefit millions of illegal migrants. (AP) |
Mexico City – The Mexican government on Tuesday applauded a U.S. Senate committee's approval of a bill that would legalize some undocumented migrants and pave the way for citizenship, but said the action is only the beginning.
Officials here want what they have called “the whole enchilada:” regularization of all the approximately 6 million illegal Mexican workers north of the border.
If Congress ultimately approves the Senate Judiciary Committee's proposal, “It would be good news, but of course it's just the start,” said Ruben Aguilar, President Vicente Fox's chief spokesman. “It's headed in the right direction, but from Mexico's point of view it doesn't resolve the entire problem.”
Fox said Tuesday that he hoped U.S. lawmakers eventually would approve a law that would resolve the situation “of all those who have work in the United States, who are hired by someone and because of that are doing a correct and productive job.”
Since he took office in December 2000, Fox has pushed for a migration accord with the United States that would legalize illegal Mexican workers in the United States and establish a guest-worker program through which Mexicans would be allowed to live in the United States temporarily as long as they had a job lined up.
Fox's then-Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda referred to that plan as “the whole enchilada.”
The Senate committee's plan is not everything Mexico had hoped for, but it does come closer than other proposals. It offers, among other things, to legalize 1.5 million undocumented agricultural workers and would grant 400,000 visas every year.
The plan is aimed at all illegal migrants, but Mexicans are believed to make up at least half of the approximately 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
The plan also represents for Mexico an important step away from a proposal approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in December that would make illegal residence a crime, build fences along a third of the U.S-Mexican border, and enlist local police and the military to help patrol it.
“This is a very friendly package for Mexico, the opposite of what passed in the House of Representatives,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, head of international studies for the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.
De Castro warned that Mexico should not start celebrating, however, given that the bill must make it through the full Senate and Congress.
Nonetheless, while urging the same caution, an editorial in Tuesday's El Universal newspaper said there are “reasonable chances” for the bill to pass, “given that it is the fruit of a long and laborious process of negotiations among congressmen with radical positions and liberal senators.” |
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