Free Republic

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday agreed tentatively to open up U.S. highways to Mexican trucks — a step that finally could put the United States in permanent compliance with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico proposes to cut in half its retaliatory tariffs on 99 U.S. products exported to Mexico immediately upon completion of a final proposal. Once the first Mexican trucking company is authorized to make deliveries beyond the border zone, the remaining half of the tariffs will be removed, the White House said. In a far-ranging summit in Washington,...

WASHINGTON -- Question: Who has the most influence with President Bush on the volatile issue of immigration reform? (A) The employing elites who are addicted to the cheap and docile labor pool that illegal immigrants provide? (B) The working-class and middle-class voters, including many legal immigrants, in the Republican Party's base who are frustrated with the lax controls on illegals? (C) The mostly minority backlash voters who, if Congress passes the sort of a tough, enforcement-only immigration bill that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) suggests, could cost the Grand Old Party support in Florida and Southwestern states for years...

GOP STRATEGIST IS TAKING HEAT FOR TAKING MEXICO AS CLIENT... Mexican government has taken out ads urging Mexican workers to denounce rights violations in the United States. It also is hiring an American public relations firm to improve its image and counter growing U.S. concerns about immigration. The American public relations firm recruited by a foreign government to organize an international campaign against a U.S. effort to protect its national borders is Allyn & Company. This company is organizing an international PR campaign to shame the United States and to attack its efforts to reform its immigration policies in favor...