In exchange for a guest worker program, would Mexico agree to help stop the flow of illegal immigrants?
What you call illegal immigrants are really undocumented people already working in the United States. The only way to stop that would be to create the jobs in Mexico. See, the migration problem is a problem of supply and demand for labor. In the United States, you have demand for more labor. You don’t have enough people willing to work in many of these jobs. On the Mexican side, we have more people looking for jobs than jobs are supplied. The border then becomes the way this labor market in North America is segmented. We should be looking together at how we can eliminate this barrier and create the conditions for mobility of labor. It’s a labor market issue that should be put forward as a concept. It’s not a question of enforcement. It’s a question of how you stabilize two labor markets which have different conditions. But there is another solution to that: you close the border and you raise the wages for the indigenous workers. Good, if you can do that. What we are talking about here
