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 Editorials | Issues | July 2007 
Mexican Leader Slams Failure of U.S. Immigration Reform
 Agence France Presse
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 |  | By closing the door to legal migration, what the U.S. Senate is doing is opening the door to illegal immigration, which is precisely what Americans don’t want and leads to dangerous and unsafe conditions on both sides of the border.
- Mexican President Felipe Calderon |  | | Mexico City — Mexican President Felipe Calderon called the U.S. Senate’s vote Thursday blocking an immigration reform bill a “serious mistake” that would come back to haunt the United States in more ways than one.
The U.S. Senate, Calderon said in his office in El Pinos, “is making a serious mistake by ... avoiding with today’s decision a sensible solution to an immigration problem that, plain and simply, cannot be resolved with speeches.”
In a stunning defeat for a bid to grant a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, senators voted 53 to 46 to block a vote on the immigration bill, likely ending congressional action on the divisive issue until after the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
“By closing the door to legal migration,” said Calderon, “what the U.S. Senate is doing is opening the door to illegal immigration, which is precisely what Americans don’t want and leads to dangerous and unsafe conditions on both sides of the border.”
“The U.S. economy cannot prosper and move forward without the manual labor of immigrants from Mexico and Central America,” Calderon warned.
The U.S. Senate, he added, “is sacrificing the livelihoods of millions of people and families, plunging into poverty huge areas of not only Mexico, but of the United States as well.”
Calderon said the Mexican government would continue to reject “unilateral measures” on illegal immigration such as the border fence the United States is building along some sectors of the U.S.-Mexican border.
As many as 500,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America make it across the border into the United States each year. |
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