In his second call to an international leader (Canada’s Justin Trudeau was the first), U.S. President Joe Biden discussed cooperation on a range of bilateral and regional issues with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
According to the White House, Biden outlined his plan to reduce migration by “addressing its root causes, increasing resettlement capacity and lawful alternative immigration pathways, improving processing at the border to adjudicate requests for asylum, and reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies.”
The two leaders agreed “to work closely to stem the flow of irregular migration to Mexico and the United States, as well as promote development in the Northern Triangle of Central America,” the readout stated.
Even though Lopez Obrador acquiesced to Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies and blocked Central American migrants’ passage though Mexico, he has always stressed that migration will only end if its root cause, regional poverty, is tackled head on. The Mexican president said that during their conversion, the new U.S. president vowed to send US$4 billion to help development in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Unlike in his discussion with Trudeau, in which the two leaders broached the thorny issue of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a project that Biden scrapped on his first day in office, neither the U.S. or Mexican presidents chose to mention any delicate topics between the two neighbors. These include Mexico’s dropping of all charges against former Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, who was returned to this country for prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice; or recent legislation effectively stripping U.S. law enforcement agents active in Mexico of their legal immunity.