MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Migration to the US, key issue of Mexican election

The illegal migration of Mexicans to United States is rapidly becoming a key topic of this year's Mexican presidential election: the current administration claims the number of “wetbacks” has considerably dropped in recent years and the opposition argues poverty and unemployment is pushing hundreds per day to the north.

Mexican presidential spokesperson Ruben Aguilar said that the migration problem is serious but statistics compiled over the past few years show that the phenomenon "has diminished, because Mexican official social policy is effective in reducing extreme poverty".

Aguilar indicated that government statistics indicate that "over 80% of Mexicans migrating to the United States have jobs in Mexico" and they go north "not out of lack of employment but because of another set of conditions?and because they hope for a better quality of life".

Over the weekend left wing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador harshly criticized Conservative President Vicente Fox's handling of the Mexican migration problem to United States.

He attributed the flow of thousands of Mexicans north to the lack of jobs at home and condemned the government's response to the U.S. bill that would allow building walls along the border to prevent undocumented migrants from crossing into the US.

This Monday the Foreign Affairs ministers from Central America, Colombia and the Dominican Republic are scheduled to meet in Mexico City to discuss the consequences of the bill which was passed in the US Lower House and now faces the Senate vote.

Aguilar said that Mexico wants U.S. authorities to become aware "of the absurdity of the walls proposed and the absurdity of a purely police view of the migration problem". He said that the Fox administration did not consider the migration problem "to be a failure because it's a historical phenomenon that is going to take many more years to overcome".

Aguilar also underlined that the profile of Mexican migrants has changed and "nowadays the majority of them are not peasants".

Although there are no reliable numbers, human rights groups and the federal government estimate that anywhere between 15 and 17 million Mexicans live in the United States, half of them undocumented. Remittances from Mexicans abroad, mostly in the US are above 15 billion US dollars annually.