Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox's brief visit to Los Angeles this week underscored his determination to create a new and expanded role within Mexico for the millions of Mexican immigrants in the United States.
In a meeting Thursday night with representatives of the Mexican immigrant community, Fox vowed that Mexican lawmakers will give serious consideration to two long-standing pleas from Los Angeles' immigrants.
The first is to allow Mexican immigrants in the United States to cast absentee ballots in Mexican elections. Such a move would transform Southern California, with about 3 million Mexican immigrants, into a key electoral battleground. Whether immigrants who became U.S. citizens could still vote in Mexican elections is one of many thorny questions.
The second idea is to create congressional seats in the Mexican Congress to represent the 7 million-plus Mexican immigrants living in the United States.
Beyond the specifics, Fox stressed his desire to embrace all U.S. residents of Mexican ancestry--those born in Mexico as well as those born in the United States. This population, which official estimates put at more than 17 million nationwide, has "a key role to play in the transition to the new Mexico," the president said.
Earlier, in a speech at a downtown hotel, Fox called for "the active participation of the entire Mexican nation, defined in the broadest sense of the word. . . . Mine will be the first Mexican administration to sincerely honor the ties that bind people of Mexican descent to the United States. I will hear the needs and respect the dreams of all those who share our Mexican heritage, here in Los Angeles and in Mexico."
Mexican nationals have long provided key support to the Mexican economy. The stream of checks and money orders arriving from homes, banks and storefront money-transfer stations from Los Angeles to New York accounts for as much as $8 billion annually in hard currency--an amount that, in recent years, has helped force Mexico City to recognize the importance of this swelling population.
But Fox, who takes office Dec. 1, promises to take the relationship to a different level--to create "a new era in relations between Mexico and communities of Mexican origin in the United States."
In so doing, the president-elect signaled a complete break from the attitude of disdain, condescension and even hostility that generations of Mexican leaders displayed toward countrymen and women living north of the border.
