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 Editorials | Opinions | July 2007 
Mexican Memo to Bush: "Tear Down This Wall!"
 Edward M. Gomez - SFGate
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"Mr. Bush, tear down this wall!"
That's something many Mexicans would like to hear their president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, echoing Ronald Reagan's famous 1987 declaration to the Soviet Union's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, state firmly and directly to the current occupant of the White House, whose federal employees are busy building a high-tech fence along the U.S.-Mexico border to keep illegal immigrants from crossing over onto American soil.
However, even in the aftermath of last week's failed immigration-reform bill in the U.S. Congress - a humiliating, political defeat for lame-duck George W. Bush, Jr. - few Mexicans expect their president to stand up to Washington and demand that U.S. policy-makers finally do something - anything - to resolve the status of their undocumented compatriots in El Norte. For, like his predecessor, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who also represented the conservative, center-right National Action Party (PAN), since Calderón took office last December, he has appeared to be unwilling to or uninterested in tackling the thorny, illegal-immigration issue head-on.
After all, it's a huge problem for Mexico, too: The fact that hundreds of thousands of poor Mexicans (not to mention many well-educated, more affluent professionals) head to the U.S. every year in search of what they hope will be better economic opportunities is a stinging embarrassment for Mexico's federal government. The ongoing trend prompts many Mexicans to wonder why their political leaders do not or cannot do a better job of steering the economy, stimulating job growth and fostering conditions that would discourage their dissatisfied countrymen from leaving.
Bush's man in Mexico City, American Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza, responded to the news of the failed immigration bill, which Republicans in the U.S. Senate effectively killed, by stating the obvious. Garza issued a statement saying that he, Bush, "many senators" and most Americans realize that immigration-law reform is "necessary."
Mexico's left-leaning daily, La Jornada, points out that the collapse of the proposed immigration-reform bill in the U.S. Congress gives Calderón a unique opportunity to take the lead in addressing an issue that is sensitive and urgent, as far as both the United States and Mexico are concerned - but will he?
In reaction to last week's events in Washington, angry members of Mexico's congress urged Calderón to seize the moment and show leadership on the immigration issue, if not to take the opportunity to distance his government from Washington and to begin to assert a sense of regional leadership, too. Calderón's fellow PAN member, Senator Ricardo García Cervantes, said the illegal-immigration issue shouldn't be left to American law-makers to wrestle with or resolve alone. The time has come for Calderón's government to "do its job" and "initiate a series of efforts to restart debate" on the contentious subject, García Cervantes proposed. Earlier, a group of congressmen from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had sent Calderón a letter insisting that he contact his pal Bush and demand that the U.S. immediately stop the construction of the Republican president's border wall - especially because, in some places, it appears to be illegally encroaching on Mexican territory. (La Jornada)
In fact, news reports have pointed out that an older section of U.S.-built border fencing, part of a 15-mile-long segment that stretches from Columbus, New Mexico, to a rural onion farm and cattle ranch, was actually erected on Mexican soil in error. As a result, "embarrassed [U.S.] border officials say the mistake could cost the federal government more than $3 million to fix....[A] routine aerial survey [that was conducted] in March revealed that the barrier protrudes into Mexico by [one] to [six] feet." (Associated Press)
The PRI congressmen have even suggested that Calderón withdraw Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. if Bush does not quickly respond to their demand that the fence-building cease.
Edward M. Gomez, a former U.S. diplomat and staff reporter at TIME, has lived and worked in the U.S. and overseas, and speaks several languages. He has written for The New York Times, the Japan Times and the International Herald Tribune. |
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