Mexican President Thrilled With U.S. Primary Results
Excerpted from today’s Los Angeles Times:
MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that a shifting political climate in the U.S. could improve the chances that a new administration in Washington will help bring a comprehensive reform law that would legalize the status of Mexican immigrants.
“My hope is that whoever the next president is, and whoever is in the new [U.S.] Congress, will have a broader and more comprehensive view” of the immigration problem, Calderon said. Speaking at the presidential residence Los Pinos on the morning after the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., Calderon said he took heart from the results, though he did not mention specific candidates.
“It seems to me that the most radical and anti-immigrant candidates have been left behind and have been put in their place by their own electorate,” Calderon said.
In Sacramento, he is scheduled to meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Latino legislators. In Los Angeles the following day, he is to meet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and migrant groups’ representatives assembled by the nine Mexican consulates in California.
He will tell fellow Mexican citizens “that we are actively working to defend their human rights,” Calderon said. “No matter their immigration status, they are human beings with dignity and rights that should be respected. We are working, with the full effort of the government, to bring a halt to the campaigns that harass migrants.”
Calderon said one goal of his trip, which will include a talk Monday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was to build public support for an immigration reform law that would allow millions of Mexicans to work in the U.S.
He said Americans would recognize “sooner or later” that the health of the U.S. economy is linked to integration with its neighbor and “the increased flow of goods, services, investment” between the two countries “and also greater freedom in labor markets.”
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