Mexican Newspapers Excoriate U.S. Immigration Vote

by New America Media (reposted)

Thu, Jul 5, 2007 5:45PM

Thursday, July 5, 2007 : MEXICO CITY – An editorial in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper contends that the U.S. Senate’s vote to block immigration reform goes beyond politics and represents a “severe failure” for the United States in general: “the most powerful country on the planet will have to continue living, for many months, with a scandalous contradiction between its laws and the real needs of its economy, thirsty for cheap labor to guarantee that its exports are internationally competitive, especially in agriculture.” Tightening border control will not decrease the flow of migrant workers to the north, La Jornada argues, because that would mean paralyzing entire sectors of American production.

“The ferocity of the persecution of migrants will simply translate into more deaths,” La Jornada contends. “The country of destination will continue living an insurmountable structural hypocrisy and a bloody model, without the ability or the desire to expel from its territory the millions of undocumented workers, but criminalizing them and harassing them in a systematic way.”

An editorial Mexico City’s El Universal argues that it is “highly hypocritical” that the United States accepts immigrants as workers, but won’t accept them as citizens. “But here, we are also guilty of the very same hypocrisy that we reject,” El Universal notes, “since we are neither creating the jobs nor the wages to stop the exodus.” The editorial concludes that Mexico’s task now is to be a watchdog for the human rights of Mexican migrants in the United States, and to spur development opportunities in Mexico to keep them at home.

Read More

For more information: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_...

Add Your Comments

Support Independent Media

We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!