Posted on 03/29/2006 2:32:55 PM PST by hedgetrimmer
CANCUN, Mexico – President Bush will take a break from Washington's rancorous immigration debate today when he arrives in Cancun for a summit of North American leaders to discuss border, trade and security issues.
Bush will meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox, the leader who has pushed him hardest to improve the treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States.
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It could be Bush's final formal meeting with Fox, whose successor will be elected in July. And it will be Bush's first meeting with new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The talks are a follow-up to last year's “three amigos” summit in Waco, Texas, when Bush, Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin signed a pact that Fox proclaimed would usher in “a new phase” in North American relations.
But old issues continue to color those relations. Immigration strains ties between Washington and Mexico City, with the White House fretting that the atmosphere in Cancun could be soured by heated rhetoric on Capitol Hill.
U.S.-Canadian relations are troubled by a long-standing trade dispute over softwood imports and the Bush administration's refusal to abide by a ruling from the World Trade Organization favoring Canadian industry.
In an interview with Mexican and Canadian reporters in Washington, Bush acknowledged that there have been difficult times in his dealings with the neighboring leaders.
“Face it,” he said in remarks released yesterday. “Part of the problem that we had was because of my decision to go into Iraq. And the government of both countries didn't agree.”
He said he will have a candid talk with Fox about illegal immigration. “I am disgusted by a system in which people are snuck across the border in the bottom of an 18-wheeler,” he said.
Bush also said he expects to discuss the search for a “tamper-proof system of beefing up security along U.S. borders without hindering the flow of people and goods.”
However, some experts say that none of the three leaders is in a particularly strong political position to propose major initiatives at the summit.
“President Bush is preoccupied with Iraq and political problems,” said Joseph M. Dukert, an energy analyst who tracks how the three governments work together. “Prime Minister Harper is still feeling his way in his new position and President Fox appears to have no bargaining chips left in his dealings with an opposition Congress.”
Armand Peschard Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, has low expectations for the two-day summit that ends Friday.
That, he said, is the beauty of the document that tops the Cancun agenda: the Security and Prosperity Partnership.
“The SPP has great political viability,” Sverdrup said. “It's not overly ambitious. It sets forward a series of action steps that each of the governments can take.”
When they unveiled it after last year's summit, the leaders demanded that their aides in the next 90 days work out ways to strengthen port, aviation and cargo security, improve intelligence cooperation, develop a common approach for screening travelers, protect against threats to agriculture and bolster protection of infrastructure.
Dukert said it has proven valuable “as a great mechanism for bringing people together to discuss the problems.” The most recent example was a meeting this month in San Diego to assess energy cooperation.
After a year of working groups and white papers, the governments are prepared to declare victory. A senior State Department official briefing reporters last week expressed satisfaction that the pact had done what it set out to, which he said was to build on the 12-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement by injecting security concerns into discussions previously dominated by trade.
He said the leaders wanted to communicate that “security in a post-9/11 world cannot just be understood in terms of national borders. . . . It has to be seen more broadly as a North American concern.”
But some outside analysts are more critical.
“They are basically going to Cancun for a photo opportunity and they will undoubtedly try to make it sound like relations are better than they are,” said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University.
Pastor called the SPP “really a timid paper-shuffling exercise,” adding, “There is no apparent progress on any of those issues.”
But Geronimo Gutiérrez, undersecretary for North American Affairs in Mexico's Foreign Ministry, said no one should expect progress on the scale of NAFTA.
He said it is “a continuous process to have the governments working together to help improve the business climate in North America.”
He described what the leaders are trying to do with SPP as “building on NAFTA and continuing to reduce the cost of doing business so we can keep North America competitive.”
He lauded what he called the increased intelligence sharing so that “once someone enters North America, either by air or by sea, everybody can know about it.”
He said there has also been progress in getting cars across the border with less delay. “Mexico and the United States are exchanging over $820 million on a daily basis at the border,” he said. “So it makes all the sense in the world to improve our efficiency and security at the border.”
At last year's meeting, Fox was frustrated that migration was kept off the agenda. But both sides acknowledge the debate in Washington overshadows any summit meeting.
“In terms of migration,” Gutiérrez said, “this is a very important moment, perhaps the most important moment in the past five years.”
He said Fox intends to raise the issue with Bush.
Fox also has an agenda unrelated to the business of governance. By bringing the summit here, Fox is trying to send a message to tourists that Cancun is back open for business after Hurricane Wilma hit last year.
Sverdrup said this is critical for Fox because Cancun “represents roughly a third of the revenue that Mexico receives from tourism.”
Yeah. There's one promise I think we can believe!
I can't find the exact quote but I remember reading about it. A couple of years ago at an economic summit in Canada, Fox was asked by a reporter about his feelings regarding the protesters outside. Basically he said 'Sometimes the people don't know what's good for them, so it's up to the leaders to do the right thing for the people.'
``The recent demonstrations in different places in the United States show the imminent need for an immigration accord that meets the interests of both countries,''
--Mexican presidential spokesman Rubén Aguilar, at the trilateral summit in Cancun, Mexico March 29, 2006.
Sounds like he was quoting Hillary Clintons book of soundbites.
Society will function either by voluntary cooperation or by brute force. Before the President and Congress consent to subsume American sovereignty, they need to think about how they will retain control of our society without the consent and cooperation of the governed.
"The North American Union must be created at any cost!"
you mean this?
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/july05/05-07-13.html
CFR's Plan to Integrate the U.S., Mexico and Canada
by Phyllis Schlafly
Bush faces issues with Canada and Mexico at summit
The ONLY thing President Bush needs to say is
"Get ready for the deportation of those who
entered the USA illegally."
End of "summit!"
***
Freepers, start your faxes!
Good article hedge, thanks for the ping.
I didn't notice anything about trying to get Mexico to clean up it's corruption. No agreement can be meaningful with a country as thoroughly corrupt as Mexico.
Who are you going to fax that gives a crap? The Whitehouse? Your congressman? Don't waste your time.
NWO bump. May it suffer a painful and ugly death.
BTTT
Thank goodness the spirit of the American Revolution still lives!
It's not that. Do you think your congressman actually reads faxes and letters? No way. I'm just saying it's time for something with a little more bite if you really want their attention. I believe we are at a fork in the road and the normal methods for change will definitely take us down the path that destroys the country.
The pressure groups get 4 or 5 people together to go to visit their representatives at their office. If you can get some registered voters together, they'll listen. In fact we need someone here to organize this for every state.
Now that you've mentioned it, I've often wondered about a different sort of merger, namely, the Western Canadian provinces in with the US. Maybe we could give away a few of the most hopeless blue states in the deal? LOL ....
But in all seriousness, the windmill tilting notion that anything but organic geopolitical shifts would alter borders is so infantile that even I, at my jaded and cynical worst, find it hard to believe that grown and reputedly worldly men and women consider it to be a serious goal. The nation state is still a relatively young thing and is no where near obsolescence. We are going to find that out soon. Other nation states, who do not suffer from the chimera that apparently aflicts a number of our so called leaders, are going to remind us of the nation state concept in a rather painful way.
How can one look at what is happening today and fail to see how poorly we've learned the lessons of past utopian mistakes? (e.g. most recently, 1919 - 1931 and 1871 - 1914).
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