Mexican President Vicente Fox on Immigration: Guilty of a Demographic Faux Pas. NOT Guilty of a Racist Remark!

President Fox hunting with the zeal of Don Quixote for benefits in America’s immigration policy for his fleeing citizens…

In his quixotic quest to establish (legally) open boarders between his country and the United States, Mexico’s President Vincente Fox has shown little regard for diplomacy and political correctness. After all, this is the President who flouted protocol (and good manners) on his first state visit to the US in 2001 by blindsiding President Bush with demands for more than 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants to be granted amnesty, work visas and all of the privileges of US citizenship – except the right to vote.

Of course, little did he know that Bush was equally gauche and bereft of political good manners. Because only this explains why almost 4 years later Fox is still making his demands and Bush is still ignoring him with his patented Texas grin.

Bush to Fox: Hey, mi presidente amigo, read ma lips; Amnesty for your campesinos? No can do! hee, hee, hee…

Indeed, adding insult to his disregard of Fox, Bush announced immigration reforms last Friday that seem intended to squash Fox’s hopes (no matter how delusional) of any accommodation by the US on this politically contentious issue. In fact, one of the principal features of Bush’s new immigration policy is the building of an Israeli-style wall designed to keep out not only bogeymen suicide bombers but also desperate illegal immigrants looking for menial work. It was this announcement, however, that prompted the latest display of Fox’s undiplomatic and politically incorrect ire.

Responding to Bush’s immigration reforms, Fox expressed his exasperation as follows:

There’s no doubt that the Mexican men and women — full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work — are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.

Ironically, as political rhetoric goes, this statement has the rare quality of being both measured and factually correct! Moreover, there is not even the shadow of racism in the record of Fox’s public statements on the racially sensitive issue of illegal immigration. Yet, he has been roundly pilloried as a racist by newspaper editors in the US and Mexico. And, as if their distortions of his statement were not egregious enough, Jesse Jackson has now added his lyrically divisive voice to chorus of those reprimanding Fox.

But why has this statement ignited so much political outrage?

After all, no one can deny that dignified, hardworking Mexicans ARE doing (essential) work in America that not even blacks want to do. Indeed, when was the last time anyone saw a black American picking fruit in the fields of California or harvesting cabbage on the farms of Wisconsin? In fact, here’s what Shirley Valdez – a Mexican who works on a broccoli farm in Aroostook County, Maine – thinks of the politically correct concerns of critics like Rev. Jackson:

Well, do you see anybody else out there picking the broccoli? No. Someone’s gotta do it, and we’re the ones.

Nevertheless, at least Jackson deserves credit for holding his patented race card and focusing instead on Fox’s erroneous implication that blacks comprise the majority of America’s poor for whom Mexicans are picking up the slack in menial jobs. Because the fact is that whites far outnumber blacks on America’s welfare and poverty rolls. And, therefore, it would have been more statistically and politically correct for Fox to assert that Mexicans are “doing the work not that even [poor] whites want to do…”.

(Of course, racist attitudes in America are such that this more accurate statement would not have been nearly as provocative.)

But immigration is much too important a political issue to be trivialized in this way. Because even though he should have done more by now about conditions in his own country that cause so many Mexicans to run for the US border, President Fox raises legitimate points about the seemingly intractable problem of illegal immigration. And, despite the adage that good fences make good neighbors, America’s immigration wall will prove as effective as locking the front door of one’s home with the thief already hiding in the closet….

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