Mexico predicts immigration accord, calls border wall 'useless'By Mark Stevenson
The Associated Press, October 3, 2006
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20061003-1207-wst-mexico-borderfences.htmlMexico City (AP) -- President Vicente Fox's spokesman said Tuesday that an extended U.S. border fence was “useless and unworkable,” and he predicted that the two countries would reach some form of immigration accord “sooner or later.”
In a diplomatic note sent to the United States on Monday, Mexico harshly criticized a U.S. Senate vote authorizing 700 miles of new fencing along the border. The project will cost an estimated $1.2 billion.
It must be signed into law by President Bush to become law, and Mexico is lobbying him to veto it.
Fox spokesman Ruben Aguilar said Mexico still wants comprehensive immigration reform that would allow more people to migrate to the United States legally.
Aguilar said the border fence would affect the environment and ecology, and even the reproduction of some species.
But he said Mexico had no plans to file the kind of environmental lawsuit that was used to temporarily block another big U.S. border project, the lining of the All-American Canal, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The irrigation canal delivers Colorado River water to farms in California's Imperial Valley.
A 23-mile section of the canal has leaked river water into a groundwater aquifer shared with Mexico for decades, and plaintiffs in the case claimed that farmers and wildlife south of the border now depend on the seepage.
U.S. authorities want to line the earthen structure with concrete to save water. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August ordered work on the canal to stop while an appeal is heard in a lawsuit aimed at blocking the project.
“For the moment, a measure like the one used in the case of the All-American Canal is not being contemplated,” Aguilar said.
Topic: More Mexican arrogance reeking from south of the border (Read 5442 times)