Mexico's Fox Wraps Up First State Visit

Sept. 7, 2001 -- Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is wrapping up his first state visit to Washington today, will return home having issued a challenge to his American counterpart and with the U.S. Senate having acted on his call for immigration reform.

The Democratic-led Senate moved late Thursday to pass a White House-backed bill to extend the deadline for illegal immigrants to apply for visas by one year.

The late-night vote came after Fox had appealed for more flexible immigration and trade policies in an address to a special joint session of Congress.

The Mexican leader opened his three-day state a day earlier by challenging President Bush to strike a deal on immigration reform before the year is out.

He again pressed for a quick solution during a visit with Bush to Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday.

"Let us not pass lightly over the countless sorrows and exemplary efforts of so many men and women that we call migrants," Fox said. "We must find the resolve, the necessary act, and act quickly so that we can find shared solutions to these common problems."

Bush favors a migrant work permit program that would grant legal status to Mexican workers who entered the United States illegally.

"He's asked that we will do it within the year," the president told reporters at the White House Thursday. "One thing he'll find is that we'll put 100 percent effort into it during the year and I hope we can come up with a solution."

Bush said he would like a quick agreement as Fox called for, but called immigration "an incredibly complex issue," adding: "We've got to come up with a solution that Congress will accept."

Democrats, who control the Senate, have opposed a work permit program, but favor amnesty for all undocumented Latinos already in the country, not just Mexicans.

Members of Bush's own party have fiercely opposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants, which they say would award criminality, and beat back a Bush proposal this summer to grant amnesty for an estimated 3 million Mexican illegal migrants.

Bush, in agreement with Fox, argued that a work permit program for Mexicans needs to include Mexicans already working without papers in the United States.

What He Asks of America

During his address to Congress, Fox urged several other specific actions from the United States:

He asked the United States to suspend for two years a process by which the government determines whether a foreign government has sufficiently battled drug trafficking and transit operations. Countries that haven't can be subject to sanctions on U.S. aid and Bush also supports a change in the law.

Fox also urged Washington to be more forthcoming in sharing intelligence information with Mexican authorities on drug-trafficking operations. U.S. agencies have historically been reluctant to share such information out of concern it would be passed by corrupt Mexican officials to the drug organizations.

He asked Washington to allow border-crossing Mexican truckers freer range to deliver their goods in the United States. Currently, U.S. truckers have complete access to Mexican highways, but Mexican trucks are confined to a 20-mile zone north of the border. The United States has also resisted allowing Mexican trucks access to most of the country in the name of safety concerns. American unions have opposed access.

Bush urged Congress Thursday to eliminate language in an appropriations bill that would continue restrictions on Mexican trucking activity, threatening to veto the spending legislation if necessary.

Trust was needed, Fox said, for both countries to better address such issues.

"I stand before you with a simple message, trust needs to be the key element of our new relationship," he said.

Trust is warranted, he said, because of Mexico's democratic election of a Fox, which ended 71 years of rule by the once dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the Spanish acronym PRI.

"Mexico now has a legitimate and truly democratic leadership," he said, which "reflects "a profound change in the values and aspirations of Mexican society."

Fox's Challenges

Fox said he would work to battle poverty, corruption, problems with the judicial system, and "consolidate the rule of law" throughout Mexico.

Fox said he is "determined to make democracy and tolerance the principles that guide all government actions, and to ensure the public institutions in Mexico become the guarantors of the rights and highest aspirations of citizens."

Whether or not he can carry out the many reforms he says are needed in Mexico remains to be seen. Some remarkable changes have occurred since Fox took office in December. For the first time, Mexico has a congress in which both houses can defeat a president's program.

The president asked his Cabinet to swear to a code of ethics, the first in Mexico's history. The former Coca-Cola Mexico CEO also has announced broad educational and economic reforms. And analysts say Mexico's courts system are becoming more independent of the presidency.

Still, Fox has faced difficulties implementing his reform agenda, encountering some resistance from within his own party and facing a hemispheric economic slump. Fox was elected promising to create more 1.2 million jobs. But, so far, unemployment has climbed. A migrant worker program in the United States could help him with that, providing additional, legal employment for Mexicans.

Cooperation with the United States on counter-narcotics is said to have improved. Yet cocaine trafficking through Mexico remains unabated.

Steve Johnson, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, in Washington, believes the key to closer U.S.-Mexican cooperation is more a matter of time than trust — time for Fox's reforms to take hold, the economy to improve, and Mexican government and society to change.

"Over time, patterns of corruption and abuse of power will probably fade, at least we hope so. It's not something that's going to happen over night," he said.

All of these things are happening, said Johnson, "but it's more a question of time, and the trust will follow."

Fox concluded his first state visit to the United States today with a speech to the Organization of American States and a visit to Miami, where he was expected to give another speech and meet with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. Fox was scheduled to return home to Mexico tonight.