11 countries plan to lobby against U.S. immigration law
Via The Miami Herald
Latin
American diplomats teamed up Monday to lobby Washington against a tough
immigration plan that would include a large wall along the Mexico-U.S.
border to keep out illegal immigrants.
Foreign ministers from 11 Latin American countries gathered in the
seaside resort city of Cartagena, where they decided to send a scouting
mission to Washington next week to identify key U.S. lawmakers on the
immigration debate, Salvadoran Foreign Minister Francisco Lainez
announced.
The region will urge those lawmakers in coming weeks to change or
defeat altogether a bill making its way through the U.S. Congress that
would make it harder for undocumented immigrants to get jobs and would
authorize construction of a fence along parts of the 2,000-mile
Mexico-U.S. border.
Carolina Barco, Colombia’s foreign minister, said immigrants’
contribution to U.S. development “has been fundamental . . . but due
to Sept. 11, the pendulum seems to have shifted in the opposite
direction and migration is looked upon with a distrusting eye.”
”The point we have made with clarity is that [the border wall]
doesn’t seem to us to be the solution,” said Mexican Foreign Secretary
Luis Ernesto Derbez.
The countries meeting in Cartagena — Mexico, Central American
nations, Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic — met in January
in Mexico City to discuss the same issue, demanding the United States
to implement guest-worker programs and legalize undocumented migrants.
At that meeting, they also condemned proposals for tougher border
enforcement.
The U.S. House of Representatives already approved the bill in
December, and the Senate will consider a version of the law next month.
Authorities estimate there are about 11 million undocumented
migrants in the United States, the majority of them coming from Latin
America — mostly Mexico, but also countries as far away as Colombia
and Ecuador.
These workers have come to play an important part in Latin American
economies, sending billions of dollars home to their families each year.
The U.S. Immigration Law Blog by Ashwin Sharma 