http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/miami/16560.html

Mexican Gov´t says emigration to the U.S. is declining

Wire services
El Universal
January 10, 2006

The presidential spokesman said emigration of Mexicans to the United States has declined because the government has reduced extreme poverty.

The president´s office said Monday that the emigration of Mexicans to the United States declined over the last few years.

Presidential spokesman Rubén Aguilar said that the emigration problem is serious but statistics compiled over the past few years show that the phenomenon "has diminished, because the state´s social policy is showing results in reducing extreme poverty."

At a press conference, Aguilar said that government figures indicate that "more than 80 percent of the people who migrate to the United States have jobs in Mexico" and so they do not go north "out of lack of employment but because of another set of conditions ... and because they hope for a better quality of life."

On Sunday, presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador leveled harsh criticism at President Vicente Fox´s handling of the emigration problem in this country.

He attributed the flow of thousands of Mexicans north to the lack of jobs at home and condemned the government´s response to the U.S. law that seeks to build more walls along the border to prevent undocumented migrants from crossing into the United States.

On Monday, the foreign ministers of Central America and Colombia, and the deputy foreign minister of the Dominican Republic met in Mexico City to discuss the law, which was already approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and must now be voted on in the Senate.

Aguilar said that Mexico wants U.S. authorities to become aware "of the absurdity of the walls and the absurdity of a purely police view of the migration problem."

He said that the Fox administration did not consider the migration problem "to be a failure because it´s a historical phenomenon that is going to take many more years to overcome."

Aguilar also said that the profile of the emigrants has changed and that "nowadays the majority of them are not peasants."

The Pew Hispanic Center says that some 11 million Mexicans live in the United States, half of them undocumented.