The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, thanked his American counterpart, Joe Biden, on Thursday for not treating Mexico as a “backyard.” and also highlighted his promise to regularize eleven million migrants. López Obrador spoke this way in his first meeting in person with Biden, in the context of the IX Summit of North American Leaders, which was held at the White House and which also had the participation of the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
From the oval office, Biden trusted that his alliance with López Obrador will show that “Democracies can work” in the face of the rise of “autocratic” models such as the Chinese. At the beginning of the meeting between the two leaders, the US president said that no longer considers Mexico as the “neighbor to the south”Instead, both nations are related as “equal countries” based on “mutual respect.”
In the immigration field, the meeting came two days after the biden government said in a court document that he will probably resume “in the next few weeks” the program known as “Stay in Mexico”, which forces asylum seekers in the United States to wait for the development of their applications in the neighboring country. After a federal judge invalidated Biden’s attempt to end that controversial program, the US government is forced to restart it.
As announced in a previous meeting with the US Vice President, Kamala Harris, López Obrador thanked Biden for his reform proposal to regularize eleven million migrants. He stressed that it is a promise he made to Mexicans living in the United States during his last visit to New York. “We are attentive to that process and we want Congress to support it, both the legislators of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party“, he indicated.
López Obrador also highlighted the “more than 200 years of relationship” between the two countries. In turn, he highlighted the importance of the free trade agreement for North America. “We greatly appreciate this respectful treatment and we are going to participate in the economic integration of North America and the entire continent. Economic integration with respect to our sovereignty, we have many possibilities to strengthen ourselves“, declared the Mexican president.
Along the same lines, Biden stressed that both nations are peers: “Actually, Mr. President, we no longer use expressions such as ‘our friends from the south’. Our countries are on an equal footing and that is what I like about you.” Prior to this meeting, the Mexican president had met with the Canadian premier at the Mexican Cultural Institute located in Washington, where discussed “common issues such as indigenous peoples and women’s leadership”.
With this series of encounters, Biden resurrected the summit buried by former President Donald Trump. As it has been doing with its European and Asian allies, it wants to improve relations between the three great North American countries that form the Treaty of Mexico, the United States and Canada (T-MEC). However, many of the most important divisions remain.
Both Mexico and Canada are alarmed by Biden’s proposal for tax credits to promote US manufacturing of electric vehicles. And Canada and the United States disapprove of López Obrador’s constitutional reform for the electricity sector, due to its potential impact on private investments.
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