AMLO proposes to Biden to regularize temporary Mexican workers in the U.S.

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López Obrador estimates that the northern neighbor will need between 600,000 and 800,000 people for the fields and industries in the coming years

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will propose this Monday to Joe Biden, his US counterpart, an agreement to regularize temporary workers in the United States. The Mexican president estimates that the northern neighbor will need a workforce of between 600,000 and 800,000 Mexican and Central American migrants to boost the US economy in the coming years. The migration issue and the management of the pandemic are some of the points to be discussed on the agenda of the first bilateral meeting to be held this Monday at noon (local time) virtually.

López Obrador, who surprisingly maintained a solid relationship with Donald Trump, advanced his expectations of the meeting this weekend during a tour of the state of Zacatecas, a traditional expulsion of migrants to the north. “We are ordering the migratory flow, legalizing it to give the workers a guarantee that they do not risk their lives and that human rights are protected,” said the president on Saturday, who assured that Washington does not have this number of workers needed in the field. and the factories “despite” automation and robotics and technological advancement. ” “Then it is better that we reach a good agreement,” he added.

Washington, however, wants to avoid the knock-on effect that the dismantling of the harsh immigration policy of the Donald Trump Administration and the regularization of eleven million undocumented immigrants in the US could cause. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, a veteran Democrat of the governments of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, launched a message on Friday for those who plan to migrate north. “Don’t do it. We are strictly enforcing new immigration laws and our security measures at the border, ”he communicated in a series of teleconferences with Mexican authorities. The more than 3,000 kilometers of borderline between both countries, important commercial partners, have been closed since March 2020 for any non-essential travel due to the Covid-19 crisis.

The Biden Administration has begun reviewing some 25,000 requests from Mexican and Central American asylum seekers. The majority will be rejected, has advanced the veteran diplomat Roberta Jacobson, former ambassador to Mexico, who is in charge of the common border with the new Democratic government.

The president of Mexico will also raise with Biden the need to facilitate access to the US vaccine market, an anonymous White House source told Reuters. The Mexican Foreign Ministry has not confirmed this information to EL PAÍS, but the issue has been one of López Obrador’s obsessions in recent weeks. The leader of the leftist Morena has used his daily conferences to denounce the hoarding of immunizations by developed economies and even raised the issue in the UN Security Council. Mexico has been forced to import the drug from the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer from a plant in Belgium due to the difficulty of obtaining vials in the US. So far, the Latin American nation has 3.8 million doses for a population of 126 million inhabitants. And it adds 185,000 deaths and two million infected by the virus.

Mexico has shown signs of goodwill to turn the page after the tumultuous era that Trump marked. The López Obrador administration has sent a new ambassador to Washington, Esteban Moctezuma, a veteran politician who left the Education portfolio of the Mexican government and who has no diplomatic experience. It is an invitation to write a new chapter in a bilateral relationship that is constantly reinventing itself.

Source: elpais.com

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