Word: foxes
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There's something charmingly Quixotic about a Mexican President ambling into the White House in cowboy boots and urging his host to make the most profound change in decades to U.S. immigration law - and to do it before Christmas. But Vicente Fox is nothing if not Quixotic. It took an iconoclast with an irrepressible buccaneering spirit to break the monopoly on power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had run Mexico as its private hacienda for 70 years. But Fox ultimately owed his popular election victory last year to the profound hopes of most Mexicans for a better life...
...Fox's ambitious agenda encompasses everything from police reform, stamping out corruption and cutting a political deal to end the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas to opening up Mexico's heavily bureaucratized economy to the bracing winds of market forces. And right now, he's not doing very well. Nor could he be expected to, since the legislature is controlled by his enemies. Russian reformer Boris Yeltsin had the same problem in the '90s, but Fox doesn't have Yeltsin's option of sending in tanks to shell parliament. So, much of his agenda remains stalled...
...case of Yeltsin, Washington has a deep desire to see Fox succeed - and a strong self-interest in doing what it can to help him. President Bush is prepared to go to bat for the rights of Mexican truckers to ride U.S. highways, and to press Congress to abandon the annual ritual of certifying Mexico as a drug war ally, which the Mexicans find insulting. But the faltering U.S. economy is making life difficult for Fox, as last year's roaring 7 percent growth rate gives way to this year's stagnation, and Mexico sheds jobs instead of creating desperately...
...President Fox's pushiness in surprising the White House with his call to conclude an immigration deal by year's end is a reminder of how much he had riding on this week's state visit. Immigration is an area where Bush can help Fox a great deal - and even potentially help himself in the process. More than 3 million undocumented Mexicans currently work in the U.S., and Fox wants their status legalized. His reasons are partly economic, and partly political. Granting them legal status would free Mexican migrants from the exploitation of the low-wage off-the-books economy...
...that Washington has accepted a truth that Mexico has long held to be self-evident: That migration across the Rio Grande is essentially an economic problem. There'd be little reason for Mexicans to risk the harrowing passage if there were decent jobs to be had at home. Thus Fox's plan for immigration reform, coupled with economic reform to grow the Mexican economy. But President Bush also has plenty of reason to be cautious, since curbing immigration has long been a hot-button issue for his party's conservative base. And the U.S. economic downturn will increase the pressure...