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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2006 
Fox Urges Canada to Open Doors to 'Guest Workers'
 Alan Freeman - Globe and Mail
| | Mexican President Vicente Fox listens to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper respond to a question at a joint news conference at the conclusion of their Summit in Cancun Mexico Friday March 31, 2006. (AP/CP,Tom Hanson) |
Mexican President Vicente Fox has proposed that Canada open its doors to growing numbers of unskilled Mexican "guest workers" to deal with a looming labour shortage brought on by an aging Canadian population.
In an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail on the eve of this week's Cancun summit with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President George W. Bush, Mr. Fox said Canada should greatly expand its current temporary work program for agricultural workers from Mexico.
"We should move out from agriculture to other services and other kinds of jobs and we are working on this with the Canadian government," Mr. Fox suggested yesterday, noting that Canada is facing the same problem of an aging population as the United States.
"I hope that you will expand that agreement to include [plant] nurseries, construction, services like fast food and restaurants and golf courses," he continued.
The President provided few details of his proposed scheme but said Mexican workers should be able to sign up with Canadian employers for specific time periods, presumably longer than for migrant farm workers, who usually come for limited harvest periods and then return home to Mexico.
The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program allows Canadian farms to recruit foreign workers on the condition they can't find Canadians to harvest their crops.
The program, which started in 1974, began with only a handful of foreign workers but has expanded to more than 18,000.
Last year, 7,200 Mexican workers came to farms in Ontario -- so many that last year the Mexican government set up a new consulate in Leamington, Ont., where many of the farms are based.
The workers may only stay in Canada for eight months out of a year. Government officials say 80 per cent of them return from year to year and illegal immigration is only a minor problem.
Mr. Fox backs the introduction of a large-scale guest-worker program for Mexican workers in the United States as part of a solution to the growing problem of illegal immigration but that plan has run up against political opposition in the U.S. Congress and among anti-immigration activists.
(Yesterday in Washington, the Senate judiciary committee approved election-year immigration legislation that clears the way for millions of undocumented workers to seek U.S. citizenship without having to first leave the country. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, voted for the bill but signalled that some of the provisions could well be changed by the full Senate.) Although Mr. Fox is nearing the end of his six-year presidential mandate without a solution for the immigration issue, he sees the rising temperature in the U.S. debate, including this weekend's massive demonstration in Los Angeles by legal and illegal Latino immigrants, as an opportunity for a solution.
"When I see problems on the borders, when I see the conflicts over the past six months, it is the best signal that we are about to find a solution," he said, adding that he is convinced that the "xenophobic" and "violent voices" in the United States represent a minority.
Mr. Fox granted the 25-minute interview in a wood-panelled cabin in the presidential Boeing 757 as it flew across the vast desert expanse of northern Mexico en route to the opening of a new hospital in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex.
The 63-year-old President has been criss-crossing the country in recent weeks in a virtual election campaign that includes everything but overtly political speeches. Mexican law precludes an outgoing president from campaigning for his successor, so Mr. Fox limits his speech to vaunting his presidency's achievements in education and health and in solidifying Mexican democracy.
But during the opening ceremony for the impressive facility, located in a bleak industrial suburb alongside the U.S.-owned assembly plants that form the economic base of this border town, Mr. Fox warned against falling into the trap of "demagoguery" and "populism."
It was an unsubtle reference to former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-leaning presidential candidate who is leading the polls in the campaign for the July 2 vote, with the candidate of Mr. Fox's own party a distant second.
In the interview, Mr. Fox said undocumented workers in the United States are "decent, hard-working" people whose status must be legalized and whose contribution to the country needs to be acknowledged.
"What would be California without Mexican workers? What would be the capacity and competitiveness of U.S. farm production if it weren't for the Mexicans?"
Among U.S. politicians, there is widespread opposition to any legalization of the millions of undocumented workers already in the country, for fear that it would reward law breakers.
"We are not talking about amnesty," retorts Mr. Fox. "We are not talking about giving them U.S. nationality," he said. What these workers should receive is the right to cross back and forth across the border and to bring their families to the United States, he added.
Mr. Fox disputes the estimates that there are as many as 11 million illegal migrants in the United States, insisting that there are between three and four million undocumented Mexicans workers in the country.
"They are working for somebody, for a corporation, for a business, for a local government, for a hospital, for a school," the President said. "They are decent, they are hard-working, they are productive and they are contributing enormously to the U.S. economy."
"Let's not forget that the U.S. is a migrant country. It was built by migrants from England and France and Poland and everywhere in the world, and now by Mexicans."
With a report from Jonathan Woodward in Vancouver |
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