Trump, Peña Nieto Discuss Mexican Guest-Worker Proposal Leaders also address Nafta renegotiation in one-on-one meeting at G-20 summit; ‘we’ve made very good progress By Robbie Whelan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-pena-nieto-discuss-mexican-guest-worker-proposal-1499460950?mod=nwsrl_politics_and_policy
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and U.S. President Donald Trump, at their first one-on-one meeting since Mr. Trump took office, agreed Friday to explore new ways of allowing Mexican workers to temporarily enter the U.S. to help the agriculture industry.
The proposal came at the end of a half-hour meeting between the two heads of state at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, where both sides also discussed the coming renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mexico’s government said it hoped to finish by the end of this year.
“We’re negotiating Nafta and some other things with Mexico and we’ll see how it all turns out, but I think that we’ve made very good progress,” Mr. Trump said after the meeting, according to Reuters.
Despite the upbeat message, the meeting could have gotten off on the wrong foot when a reporter asked Mr. Trump if he still wanted Mexico to pay for the proposed border wall. Mr. Trump answered, “Absolutely,” according to a video posted online by ABC News.
Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, who was seated next to Mr. Peña Nieto during the exchange, said he didn’t hear what Mr. Trump said, but added that the subject of the wall wasn’t brought up during the meeting. Mexican officials have insisted they would walk out of any meeting between both sides if the U.S. team brought up Mexico paying for the wall.
In Mexico, Messrs. Peña Nieto and Videgaray were both criticized on social media for not canceling the meeting after Mr. Trump’s comment.
The idea for a guest-worker program comes as the Trump administration is deporting growing numbers of illegal immigrants in the U.S. It would reprise the so-called Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 that saw hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmworkers come to the U.S. legally to help pick crops and return to Mexico.
Mr. Videgaray said the plan to study a possible guest-worker program, an idea floated amid labor shortages in parts of the U.S. economy like agriculture and construction, was a sign relations were improving between both sides amid strains over a host of issues, including the proposed wall.
“The fact that the presidents agreed to explore new mechanisms for agricultural workers shows that the relationship is entering in a more constructive phase,” he said in an interview with Mexico’s Radio Fórmula. CONTINUE AT SITE
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