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 Editorials | Issues | June 2007 
Mexico Opinion Makers See Hypocrisy in Defeat of U.S. Immigration Bill
 Lisa J. Adams - Associated Press
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| | Mexico's President Felipe Calderon answers a question during a news conference at Los Pinos presidential residence in Mexico City, Thursday, June 28 2007. Calderon said Thursday the U.S. Senate made a serious mistake by killing legislation that would have led to the legalization of millions of unlawful immigrants, most of them from Mexico. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo) |
Mexico City – Opinion makers and migrant advocates in Mexico said Friday that the collapse of U.S. immigration reform plans is a loss for Mexican workers, U.S. employers and anti-terrorism efforts.
U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to legalize as many as 12 million unlawful immigrants while fortifying the border collapsed in the U.S. Senate on Thursday.
“This is very bad news for Mexican migrants in the U.S.,” said Jorge Bustamante, special rapporteur to the human rights commission for migrants at the United Nations and former president of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in the city of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California.
“It means the continuation and probably a worsening of the migrants' vulnerable conditions.”
The Rev. Luis Kendziersky, director of “Casa del Migrante,” a shelter for migrants in the city of Tijuana across the border from San Diego, California, said it appeared senators “are focused more on the political game than on the real needs of the people.”
“According to polls, the majority of the people (in the U.S.) want legality with concessions for undocumented migrants, but the radicals make a lot of noise,” he said. “They are afraid of approving a comprehensive migratory reform that at the end of the day would help the American society.”
Editorials in Mexico's major newspapers said the Senate action was hypocritical.
“It's obvious that the politicians of that country want laborers, but they are not willing to legalize the labor that they need,” declared an editorial in the national daily newspaper El Universal, whose front page headline announced that the U.S. had “buried” immigration reform.
Migrants “will continue to be subjected to extraordinary means of discrimination,” the editorial said, adding that maintaining “this subculture of illegality” in border crossings also does nothing to aid the United States' fight against terrorism.
An editorial in the left-leaning newspaper La Jornada called the decision a “triple shipwreck” – a failure for the Bush administration, the United States and Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who unlike his predecessor, Vicente Fox, did not push Washington on the issue.
“The most powerful country on the planet will have to continue living, for many more months, with the scandalous contradiction between its laws and the real needs of its economy, thirsty for cheap labor to guarantee the international competitiveness of its exports, especially in agriculture.”
Fox made immigration reform with the United States his top priority when he took office in 2000.
That dream dissolved when the Sept. 11 terror attacks turned Bush's attention to strengthening security at home.
In the wake of Fox's failure to revive the issue, Calderón has spoken in favor of a reform, but refrained from engaging the U.S. on the matter, instead focusing on what Mexico should do at home to strengthen its economy and stem the flow of its workers north.
Calderón did speak out forcefully, however, against the 700-mile (1,130 kilometers) fence Congress approved to increase security on the U.S. border with Mexico.
On Thursday, Calderón called the Senate's decision a “grave error” and a failure to find a “sensible, rational, legal solution to the migration problem.”
Authorities on both sides of the border estimate that more than 11 million Mexicans live in the United States, as many of 6 million of them illegally.
“It is very sad what has happened and that we have to now wait three or four more years to find a solution,” Father Kendziersky said, referring to the unlikelihood that the U.S. will tackle the issue in 2008, an election year. “During this time how many more families will be divided, how much more suffering will have to occur?”
But not everyone in Mexico was disappointed by the death of the bill, which would have creating a system to weed out illegal workers from U.S. jobs.
Al Rojas, spokesman for the Front of Mexicans Abroad, an advocacy group for Mexicans living in the U.S. and other countries, said the law “would have imposed prejudices, treating migrants like criminals and judging them.”
“We didn't think the law lived up to what migrants deserved,” he said in a telephone interview. “Faced with a bad law, we preferred that they approved nothing.”
Associated Press writer Istra Pacheco contributed to this report. |
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