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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2007 
Calderon Says Vote 'a Grave Error'
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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| | Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, left, and Mexican President Felipe Calderon embrace after a news conference at Los Pinos presidential residence in Mexico City, Thursday, June 28 2007. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo) |
President Felipe Calderon of Mexico reacted sourly to news of the Senate's rejection of the proposed immigration law overhaul, calling the senators' action "a grave error."
"It's a grave mistake first because it's a problem that's not being confronted, and with this evasive action the U.S. Senate is making it worse," Calderon told reporters in Mexico City during a joint news conference with President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who is finishing a two-day visit to the Mexican capital.
"Secondly, because to close the door on legal immigration, the only thing the Senate does is open the door to illegal immigration" the Mexican president said, according to an account published by the newspaper Reforma on its Web page.
Calderon repeated his "repudiation and rejection" of plans to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border.
More than a tenth of Mexico's 103 million people are estimated to live in the United States, many of them illegally. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, and others from Central America, continue to cross the border every year illegally in search of work.
Mexico's emigrants last year sent nearly $25 billion home to family members. That money has become an important anchor in many rural communities and poor metropolitan neighborhoods.
Ortega, a one-time Marxist president of Nicaragua following that country's 1970s leftist revolution against a U.S.-backed dictator, was in Mexico City to strengthen ties with Mexico and also to visit the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The Nicaraguan president had vowed to visit the shrine if he won election this year, which he did, returning to power 17 years after being voted out of office. |
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