López Obrador rejects US proposal to close the border with Mexico

The Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador On Monday he downplayed the statement made by his American counterpart Joe Biden, who was willing to close the border between USA and Mexico if lawmakers send him a border agreement.

During his morning conference López Obrador stated that the proposal is “very demagogic” and assured that it would not be viable considering the intense commercial exchange that the United States maintains with Mexico, which is its main trading partner. “You couldn’t think that that is a solution. Imagine the level of commercial integration,” he stated.

However, the Mexican president showed solidarity with Biden and expressed that he greatly respected him and understood the circumstance.

López Obrador said that he would not accept that “dishonest politicians” use Mexico as “pinata” to confront the problem of fentanyl in the United States and the migratory wave in the middle of the electoral campaign.

Biden reiterated on Saturday, during a party event in South Carolina, that he would close the border “right now” if Congress approved an agreement that has been under negotiation for weeks and that would require the United States to close the border if approximately 5,000 immigrants cross without legal authorization on a given day. Last year some one-day totals exceeded 10,000.

The bill has not been formally agreed upon by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and would face an uncertain future in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

The wave of migration that the United States has faced in recent months on its southern border has become a headache for the Biden administration and is one of the issues of concern for American voters ahead of this year’s elections.

High-level officials from the United States and Mexico met on December 27 and January 19 in the Mexican capital and Washington to define joint policies on immigration matters.

The meetings took place after a phone call that Biden made to López Obrador to express his concern about the migratory wave that kept the southern border of the United States saturated in December, where 10,000 irregular crossings were reported daily, forcing the authorities Americans to close some border crossings. After the first meeting the number of daily crossings dropped sharply to around 2,500 at the beginning of January.