Biden, Mexican leader Obrador focus on migration, security in talk
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden met virtually Monday with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — a chance for the pair to talk more fully about migration, confronting the coronavirus and cooperating on economic and national security issues.
“This is what I know, the United States and Mexico are stronger when we stand together,” Biden told Lopez Obrador at the outset of the meeting, alluding to past differences between the countries. “We’re safer when we work together. Whether it’s addressing the challenges of our shared border or getting this pandemic under control.”
Mexico’s president had said he intended during the meeting to propose to Biden a new immigrant labor program that could bring 600,000 to 800,000 Mexican and Central American immigrants a year to work legally in the United States.
A senior Biden administration official declined to say whether the U.S. president would back or oppose the proposal, saying only that both countries agree on the need to expand legal pathways for migration. The official insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Asked about the Mexican president’s proposal, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that reinstituting the “Bracero” program would require action by Congress.
The original Bracero program allowed Mexicans to work temporarily in the United States to fill labor shortages during World War II and for a couple of decades after the war. Lopez Obrador said the U.S. economy needs Mexican workers because of “their strength, their youth.”
On Monday, Lopez Obrador said his new proposal would be a program not only for agriculture workers but for other sectors and professionals.
The White House also signaled that Biden was not willing to budge on another Lopez Obrador request — to send U.S. manufactured coronavirus vaccines to his country. Psaki said Biden would not agree to the move, saying the president was first focused on getting Americans vaccinated. A similar posture toward Canada has also proved to be a wrinkle in that relationship.
The Biden official said the meeting will help Biden begin to institutionalize the relationship with Mexico, rather than let it be determined by tweets — a preferred form of diplomacy by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
The United States shares a trade agreement — most recently updated in 2018 and 2019 — with Mexico and Canada, which are its second- and third-biggest trade partners after China. The trade agreement could complicate Lopez Obrador’s efforts to possibly defund and eliminate independent regulatory, watchdog and transparency agencies in Mexico.
There are also questions of whether Lopez Obrador will warm to Biden’s efforts to address climate change and move to cleaner energy sources. Lopez Obrador supports a measure to make that country’s national grids prioritize power
from government plants, many of which burn coal or fuel oil.At Monday’s news conference, Lopez Obrador confirmed they would discuss climate change, but he said “Biden is respectful of our sovereignty” because “he doesn’t see Mexico as America’s backyard.”
Pressure is also building at the U.S. southern border with an increase in children crossing into the country without visas. Border Patrol agents are apprehending an average of more than 200 children crossing the border without a parent per day, but nearly all 7,100 beds for immigrant children maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services are full.
The Biden administration has preserved a policy, imposed at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, of quickly expelling people captured along the border.