Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, is warning that a "new underclass of the undocumented" will form in the United States unless the immigration bill that will be debated in the Senate beginning next week is amended to provide more visas for low-skilled Mexicans.
In an interview on the Univision Sunday Spanish-language talk show "Al Punto", Castaneda said "There is a real problem today, which is that the number of future visas, for Mexicans in particular or people of relatively low skill, is very small. If that isn't fixed, it means that soon we will reproduce a new underclass of the undocumented, which would be a tragedy."
Castaneda, who divides his time between Mexico City and New York, where he teaches at New York University, has been retained by Univision as a foreign affairs expert.
On "Al Punto", he praised the network and news anchor Jorge Ramos, the host of the program. He said they, along with other businesses and Mexican-Americans, had built support for the reform from the relatively low level of 12 years ago, when Castaneda and then-Mexican President Vicente Fox put immigration reform at the top of the U.S.-Mexico agenda.
"We were just beginning then; there wasn't any real social pressure," Castaneda said. "There wasn't such an important Hispanic electorate, as President Obama himself said in Mexico three weeks ago — if it weren't for the Latino vote, he wouldn't be president."
For the record, here are Obama's exact words in Mexico: "In fact, without the support of Latinos, including so many Mexican-Americans, I would not be standing here today as President of the United States. That's the truth."
Castaneda's interview with Ramos is here.
