Immigration Problems WORSE after Bill Clinton 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement
Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to be able to see what is going on inside. The immigration problem is not the Mexicans' fault.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - President Vicente Fox paused for a long moment before answering a question on how long it would take Mexico to reach a stage where citizens no longer want to cross the U.S. border to seek work.
"Generations," he finally said.
"It's a long way to narrow the gap ... between incomes in Mexico and on the other side of the border," he said in a recent interview with Reuters.
That income gap is the principal reason why hundreds of thousands of Mexicans cross the border with the U.S. illegally to seek work -- yet it rarely figures in the heated and increasingly emotional debate over immigration now raging in the United States.
Roughly half of Mexico's population lives on less than $5 a day, according to government figures. The U.S. minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Annual Mexican Gross Domestic Product per capita is just under $7,000. It is almost $44,000 in the United States.
The gap is now wider than it was when Mexico, the United States and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992.
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