Does this strike you as the definition of chutzpah, or what?
The president of Mexico is touring America to tell us to give our illegal immigrants — his citizens, who can’t find work because of his crappy government’s decades-long culture of corruption, graft, bribery, and crappy economic policies — a break.
SALT LAKE CITY, May 24 — Adding a voice from south of the border to the national debate on immigration, Mexican President Vicente Fox is barnstorming the western United States this week, arguing against fencing off the U.S.-Mexico border and asking Americans for “decent treatment of our people.”
The U.S. tour is designed partly to enhance cross-border trade and investment. But Fox has also taken pains to present the Mexican view of the raging U.S. debate over immigration — or, as he calls it, “the migration phenomenon.”
Funny, we call it the “illegal immigration” phenomenon.
Addressing the Utah legislature Wednesday in accented but clear English, Fox insisted that Mexican immigrants have been a boon to this country. “Mexico is proud, very proud, of its people here, whose working spirit and moral values contribute every day to the economy and society of this great nation,” he said.
And he spoke out repeatedly here against proposals to build fences along the border. The U.S. House has passed legislation calling for a 700-mile fence to cut the flow of immigrants, and the Senate last week voted to build a three-tiered fence stretching 370 miles.
“We don’t put up walls,” Fox told a predominantly Latino crowd in Spanish at a lively rally Tuesday in a Salt Lake suburb. “That’s not the way you’re going to fix the problem. Walls that pretend to solve the problem only provoke distance between two peoples.”
Um, yeah, you do put up walls, and you don’t allow immigrants from points farther south than Mexico. But hypocrisy aside — am I the only one who thinks this guy should shut the hell up, go home, and fix his own goddamned economy?
Uh, no you’re not.
This is one issue Dubya is not sound on. Well one of several. Evidentally he looked in Fox’s eyes, like Putin’s, and found a fellow soul there.
We are probably in for another period where Latin America, from the Rio Grande to lower Patagonia, decides to commit economic and political hari-kiri, by putting lefty twits into power. Those countries that are lucky will see them do little damage because they don’t put their ideas into practice, like Lula in Brazil. The rest will slide into the sewer. Chavez is already tallking about making himself El Jefe for 25 years, which I expect means life like Castro in Cuba. By the time Chavez is done Venezuela, for all its oil wealth, will be a basket case. and they’ll blame the Yanquis, of course.