Mexico hopes for an immigration accord ´sooner or later,´ while calling the border wall ´useless.´President Vicente Fox´s spokesman criticized the U.S. border fence proposal Tuesday, and predicted the two countries would eventually reach an immigration accord.
The comments came the same day Mexico´s Embassy sent a letter to Washington criticizing a U.S. Senate vote authorizing 1,125 kilometers (700 miles) of new fencing along the border.
The bill must still be signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush. Mexico is lobbying the United States leader to veto it.
U.S. State Department spokes- man Tom Casey acknowledged receipt of the diplomatic note and said State Department officials "would carefully review Mexico´s objections" to the construction of the wall.
Casey also said the United States was talking to Mexico about the issue of immigration, but he did not give details.
Presidential spokesman Rubén Aguilar said his country still wants a comprehensive immigration reform that would allow more people to migrate to the United States legally. "The wall will be useless and unworkable," Aguilar told reporters.
He said the border fence would affect the environment and ecology, and even the reproduction of some species.
But he said Mexico had no plans to file the kind of environmental lawsuit that was used to temporarily block another big U.S. border project, the lining of the All-American Canal, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The irrigation canal delivers Colorado River water to farms in California´s Imperial Valley.
A 37-kilometer (23-mile) section of the canal has leaked river water into a groundwater aquifer shared with Mexico for decades, and plaintiffs in the case claimed that farmers and wildlife south of the border now depend on the seepage. U.S. authorities want to line the earthen structure with concrete to save water. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August ordered work on the canal to stop while an appeal is heard in a lawsuit aimed at blocking the project.
"For the moment, a measure like the one used in the case of the All-American Canal is not being contemplated," Aguilar said.
