Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — popularly known as AMLO — sat down for an interview Sunday with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and made clear he controls a US southern border that has largely been abandoned by the Biden administration.
It’s a position this country should never be in.
AMLO started by describing his candid conversations with then-President Donald Trump over Trump’s signature immigration issue, the “wall,” a point of disagreement in an otherwise productive cross-border relationship.
He implicitly contrasted that with urgent pleas the Biden administration made in late December, seeking Mexico’s help to stem a rush of nearly 250,000 migrants over the border into the United States that month.
AMLO explained the administration begged him to “control the flow of migration” north, to which he responded by cracking down on illegal entries through that country’s southern border and making entreaties to other regional presidents for help curbing migrant departures from their countries.
It worked, and illegal entries dropped by 50% in January (a slow travel month traditionally), but as AMLO noted, “that is a short-term solution, not a long-term one.”
Apprehensions jumped again in February.
He didn’t do any of it out of the kindness of his heart, however.
Instead, he expects the United States to reciprocate by sending $20 billion annually in taxpayer cash to Latin America and the Caribbean to address so-called “root causes” of migration (commonly identified as some mix of poverty, crime, corruption and “climate change”), lifting sanctions on Venezuela’s socialist government — and granting amnesty to “millions of law-abiding Mexicans living in the US.”
What if those demands aren’t met?
As per AMLO: “The flow of migrants will continue.”
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