(Washington) US President Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador met by videoconference on Friday to discuss “unprecedented” immigration flows at the two countries’ border, a headache for the US administration before the midterm elections.
Posted at 6:50 p.m.
The call of just over 50 minutes, according to the White House, shed light on the increasingly complex relationship between the two neighbors, inextricably linked in terms of trade, but also migration. legal and illegal, and drug trafficking.
“A lot of the conversation was about migration and the ongoing work of coordination, economic coordination, and what steps to take to reduce immigration along the border,” the door-to-door spokesperson said after the call. White House spokesman Jen Psaki.
The White House assures that Joe Biden wants to highlight his desire to cooperate with President Lopez Obrador, in contrast, according to him, with the unfriendly approach of Donald Trump.
“Over the past year, we have worked very hard to rebuild the bilateral relationship,” a senior US official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
And according to Jen Psaki, “the tone of the call was very constructive”.
“It was not a call where President Biden threatened the Mexican president in any way,” she asserted.
With the specter of a midterm legislative defeat hovering over the Democrats, the issue of illegal immigration was at the top of the discussion agenda.
According to the senior US official, “monumental challenges” across the globe – ranging from the climate crisis to war in Ukraine to food insecurity – are driving “unprecedented levels of migration”.
At the end of the meeting, the Mexican president indicated on Twitter that his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, would go to Washington on Monday “to make progress on matters of cooperation for development and on the summit of the Americas” which is due to meet in June in Los Angeles the American countries.
The Mexican president must himself go from May 5 to 9 to Central America and Cuba, with stops in the three countries from which caravans of migrants leave (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras).
This trip is quite exceptional for a president who has traveled little abroad since coming to power at the end of 2018. Mr. Lopez Obrador has made three visits to the United States.
The already complicated situation at the US-Mexico border has been brought back into focus recently with Joe Biden’s announced desire to end “Title 42”, a device linked to COVID-19 which has allowed for two years the immediate expulsion of migrants arrested at the border.
Opponents of the device say it is no longer justified, but Republicans and some Democrats predict its removal will lead to an uncontrolled influx at the border.
Even without these restrictions being lifted, US border police have apprehended an average of 7,800 undocumented migrants each day for the past three weeks, nearly five times more than the average of 1,600 migrants recorded between 2014 and 2019, before the pandemic. .
Both political sides in Washington agree that there is a problem.
The White House is talking about a “broken” immigration system that Congress needs to fix, while Republicans accuse Biden of failing to protect the country’s southern border.