That's reassuring!

From an op-ed in the NYT entitled "What Mexico Wants" by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda:

Fortunately, most of the [Kennedy-Bush] reform proposals represent a very good deal for Mexico, however questionable they might appear to the Latino community in the United States. The current Senate package greatly resembles what President Vicente Fox and I proposed back in 2001, in meetings with President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. ...

There are three Mexican objections to the bill as it stands.

First, it has unduly harsh enforcement provisions at the border and the workplace, which will undoubtedly generate abuses and mistreatment. Still, if every Mexican in the United States who arrived before Jan. 1, 2007, is legalized, enforcement inside the United States, including discriminatory raids, will become redundant. And if nearly everyone who wants to go north can obtain a guest-worker visa, there will be no need to cross illegally and face rough treatment at the border.

A second objectionable feature is the steep fines and fees in the Senate bill: up to $5,000. While this is not cheap, it’s also not much more than the “coyote” charges to smuggle a migrant across the border.

The last objection is more substantive; it is, in fact, a potential deal breaker.

Uh, Mr. Castaneda, I was under the impression that the bill was under consideration by the United States Senate. Under the Constitution, Mexico is not represented in America's Congress, so it's not a party to the "deal." On the other hand, maybe you know something about whose interests are actually represented in my Congress that I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if you do.

The Senate voted last week to cut the number of guest worker slots to 200,000 from 400,000. The earlier figure would have allowed roughly the same number of workers who now cross illegally to obtain guest status. But if the final law has too few slots, it will not end illegal immigration, but simply perpetuate the status quo.

What’s good for Mexico is probably good, in the long term, for the United States as well; on this one, at least, Mexican and American interests coincide.

What's good for Mexico is good for the America. Yup, that's reassuring.

By the way, here are three more interesting things about Castañeda that I only learned last year from Fredo Arias-King even though I read almost everything about Castaneda published in English back in 2000-2001, when he became Vicente Fox's foreign minister.

1. He is known in Mexican newspapers "as 'El Guero' ('the Blond One') for his fair complexion."

2. His Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father met her.

In 2002, Bianca Vazquez Toness wrote in the Princeton alumni magazine:

"His father, PRI member Jorge Castañeda de la Rosa, was once foreign minister. His mother, a Russian Jew and naturalized Mexican, met her husband while working as a translator at the U.N. in New York. Young Jorge’s pedigree gave him advantages unavailable to most Mexicans: He grew up a polyglot between New York and Geneva, perfecting his English and his French, while his father served as Mexican ambassador to the U.N. He enrolled at Princeton in 1970...

His doctorate gave him clout upon returning to Mexico at age 25, but his family connections opened the door to the political elite. Castañeda, a political science professor at the national university, called himself a Communist, but that didn’t stop him from moonlighting for his father, who was appointed foreign minister in 1979. The son convinced his father to abandon Mexico’s historically anti-interventionist policy. Calling on contacts made during his school days in France, the younger Castañeda helped negotiate a joint recognition with France of rebel forces in El Salvador, much to the dismay of the U.S., which supported the government in the civil war against the Marxist guerrillas.

3. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister was his Soviet-born older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

Isn't it remarkable how little the American press tells us about the men who have run Mexico?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer