Texas governor looks at Mexico and sees trouble on the way. If it’s not kids from Guatemala, it’s the Islamic State.
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Version 0 of 1. MEXICO CITY — Like a couple of pistoleros, Texas and Mexico have been firing insults across the border. It started over children from Guatemala and El Salvador, and now it's turned to the Islamic State. The war of words started after Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) chose to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the Rio Grande Valley during the summer immigration crisis. The number of migrants caught in the South Texas region, which had reached a high of 6,600 per week in the early summer, was already rapidly falling off even before the National Guard arrived. The Houston Chronicle reported that that number had fallen to below 2,000 earlier this month. The Mexican government found the deployment an unnecessary provocation and questioned Perry’s motives for sending the troops. (Perry’s critics in Texas have accused him of doing so to boost his presidential aspirations.) Last week, the Mexican government announced it “deeply rejects and condemns the deployment of troops” and found it “irresponsible to manipulate border security for political reasons.” Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) found the Mexican message “insulting” and “offensive." President Enrique Peña Nieto followed up by calling Perry’s decision "unpleasant" and “reprehensible." By this time the Islamic State had somehow joined the fray. Perry and other Texas conservatives provoked the Mexicans by warning that Islamist extremists could be using their country to sneak into America. Perry told the Heritage Foundation last month that “we’d be very wise to remember the ISIS version of mission creep: that’s when they start following through on the threats they’ve been making by sending their recruits into this country.” “It may be when one or more of them slips across our unsecure border,” he added. Mexico dismissed such speculation as “absurd.” Perry then shot back in a letter to Peña Nieto that the immigration crisis was “partly a consequence of the failure of the Mexican government to secure its southern border from illegal immigration” or “to deploy adequate resources to control the criminal element in Mexico.” On Wednesday, Sergio Alcocer Martinez de Castro, a senior official in Mexico’s Foreign Ministry responsible for North America, would not let this stand. The problem of child migrants, he said, was not about security or the porousness of the border, but a humanitarian problem. Perry's take on it was "not supported by reality." In a meeting with Washington Post editors Thursday, Mexico's ambassador to the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora, concurred. Perry's arguments are "not factual," he said, and not "pertinent." He also pointed out that the number of Mexican Americans who can vote in Texas is going to keep growing. "Texas will change," he said. "It will take 10 to 15 years, but it will change." |