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 News from Around the Americas | March 2007 
US Denies Mexico Border Fence Hurts Ties
 Agence France Presse
| | A vehicle drives along the US-Mexico border fence (L) as activists opposing illegal immigration fly US flags on a hilltop from which they search for illegal border crossers, October 2006 near Campo, California. The White House on Thursday flatly denied that Washington's decision to build a fence along part of the US-Mexico border had crippled relations between the two neighbors. (AFP/David McNew) |
The White House on Thursday flatly denied that Washington's decision to build a fence along part of the US-Mexico border had crippled relations between the two neighbors.
"No. As a matter of fact, the relations are close," spokesman Tony Snow said when asked whether the planned 1,100-kilometer-long (700-mile-long) barrier along a third of the US-Mexico border had damaged bilateral ties beyond repair.
US President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon - who has sharply criticized the wall - "were honest with each other about things where they agreed and where they disagreed" when they met Tuesday in Mexico, he said.
"There are a lot of good things that we can do with the Mexican government: border security, drug interdiction, arms interdiction, trying to make sure that the borders are safe, building conditions for greater prosperity in Mexico - that takes pressure off the border," said Bush's spokesman.
"I would argue that what's happened is that US-Mexican relations have been strengthened as a consequence of the visit and also that the personal relationship between the two presidents was strengthened by virtue of the fact that they were candid with each other," said Snow.
Mexican President Condemns Border Fence
Stephen Dinan - Washington Times
Mexican President Felipe Calderon this week criticized the 850 miles of border fence that President Bush and Congress approved last year, saying there are better ways to stop illegal immigration.
"We do consider in a respectful way that we may truly stop the migration by building a kilometer of highway in Michoacan or Zacatecas than 10 kilometers of walls in the border," Mr. Calderon said during a welcome ceremony here, according to the official translation.
Mr. Calderon, who was sworn in as president in December, said it is time for Mr. Bush to re-establish the working relationship he had promised in early 2001, before the September 11 terrorist attacks reordered Washington's priorities.
"In a very understandable way, the priorities changed," Mr. Calderon said. "Nevertheless, I believe that it is now time to retake the spirit of those words and to direct our relationship toward a path of mutual prosperity."
Mr. Bush said the United States will enforce its immigration laws but reassured Mr. Calderon that Mexico and the U.S. are bound together including through U.S. companies that rely on Mexican labor, and Mexican families and the government that rely on the $20 billion in remittances sent home by those workers, many of them illegal aliens.
"Today, the most important ties between the United States and Mexico are not government to government, they are people to people," he said.
"These ties include the families, who send an estimated $20 billion in remittances each year to their relatives here in Mexico, one of the largest private economic initiatives in the world," he said.
Mr. Calderon welcomed Mr. Bush at a hotel here, Hacienda Temozon, which was first built as a farm in 1655. After two rounds of meetings and a social lunch with Mr. Calderon, Mr. Bush flew by helicopter to tour Uxmal, one of the best-preserved Mayan ruins, with first lady Laura Bush.
Tight security dampened the rowdy demonstrations that have greeted him in the rest of Latin America.
A tiny group of protesters gathered near Uxmal, with a banner along the highway reading "Bush, oil drinker, international terrorist, get out of Mexico." Mr. Bush and Mr. Calderon gazed out from a stone staircase at a temple as an archeologist explained the history to them.
Mr. Calderon, who has said in the past he has relatives who live in the United States, though he has never said whether they are legal, said yesterday he has seen the effects of emigration from Mexico up close in his home state of Michoacan.
"I know the pain of the families when they split and also of all those towns where the elderly are remaining alone. I also know that Mexicans lose in each migrant the best of our people, young people, working people and audacious people, strong people people that leave Mexico because they don't find the opportunities here in order to pull through with their lives," he said.
Mr. Calderon said the U.S. has the right to determine its own laws and security, but he has said that neither enforcement nor a future worker program will stop huge flows of Mexicans northward.
"Migration might not be stopped and certainly not by decree," he said, adding that the solution is to bring better jobs to Mexico to remove the incentive to leave.
"We are intensively working, so instead that our labor will be moving to where the capital is located," he said. "It will, rather, receive in Mexico the investment where the labor is located, and our families will not continue splitting themselves nor our population." |
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