Mexican President Will Promote Migrant Work Visa Program to Biden

Mexico’s president says he will share with President Joe Biden his willingness to find a way to legalize the flow of migrants from Central America and Mexico as a way to meet American labor needs.

“I have a teleconference with Biden on Monday and we are going to talk about that topic,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said this weekend during one of his news conferences. “Let’s fix the migratory flow, legalizing it, to give guarantees to the workers so they don’t risk their lives, and that their human rights are protected.”

During the conference, AMLO said the U.S. would need about 600,000 to 800,000 laborers per year for economic growth. The Mexican politician brought up the Bracero program when the U.S. provided migrant farmworkers with permits during World War II.

The topic of the migrant workflow had not been previously discussed publicly by the Foreign Relations Ministry or the Interior Secretariat ahead of the virtual meeting between Lopez Obrador and Biden.

The issue comes as Mexican authorities see a dramatic rise in human smuggling activities as thousands of Central American migrants continue to make their way north. Mexican officials predicted a dramatic rise in migratory flows at the start of 2021 due to work shortages from the pandemic and recent natural disasters that shook Central America. Officials in Mexico did not publicly discuss the political effect that a Biden Administration would have on the matter.

Mexican authorities have found several large groups of migrants at hotels or being moved in tractor-trailers in recent weeks. Officials are also seeing a spike in ransom kidnappings where cartel-connected human smugglers hold migrants to further extort their families.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com. 

Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.