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 News from Around the Americas | June 2005 
U.S. Must 'Revitalize' Ties
 Jonathan Clark - The Herald Mexico
| | Former U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks at a leadership conference in Mexico City on Tuesday (Photo: AP) |
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday called for a revitalization of Mexican-U.S. bilateral relations and said that the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks had caused the United States to neglect its neighbors in the hemisphere.
Speaking at a leadership and collective prosperity conference in Mexico City, Clinton said that by now, the United States "ought to be organized and settled enough" after the Sept. 11 attacks "to continue a comprehensive campaign against terror and at the same time revitalize our vital relationships in the Americas."
As part of revitalizing relations with Mexico, he argued for the need for immigration reform, which he said had become stalled "not because there's an antiMexican feeling, but because our Congress sees every issue through the prism of terrorism."
He said that new arguments were needed to help convince Congress and the U.S. public that Mexican immigrants posed no security threat to the United States, and that orderly immigration could help provide a solution to pressing domestic issues.
"We need to figure out a way to meet America's commitment to terrorism concerns without undermining the promise of immigration," he said, adding that the controlled immigration of a quarter of a million people per year could offset slow population growth and help alleviate the Social Security shortfall.
"Don't give up on us," he told the audience of nearly 1,000. "Down deep inside, every American knows that our future is tied to yours … that our country has been enriched by Mexican immigrants and that we share values of family, faith and work."
Clinton also praised Mexico's continued transition towards democracy, and singled out his former counterpart, Ernesto Zedillo, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president who oversaw President Fox's historic election in 2000.
"Mexico is a greater democracy than it used to be because Zedillo had the courage to give you genuine elections and put his own party at risk and I'll never forget that as long as I live," he said.
In his introductory remarks, former Zedillo cabinet member Luis Tello recalled Clinton's emergency US20 billion loan granted to Mexico at the height of the nation's economic crisis in 1995. "It is not too much to say, President Clinton," said Tello, "that thanks to your leadership millions of Mexicans are today enjoying a much better life than they would have if you had not been there in those critical days."
Clinton in turn thanked Mexico for its timely repayment of the loan, which it completed three years ahead of schedule in January 1997. "If Mexico had not paid back the loan," he said, "I would not have been re-elected and I would not be here today." |
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