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It is a poor choice of words by the president, who is a member of the conservative political party in Mexico, the Partido Acción Nacional or PAN, whose election in 2000 marked the end of a 76-year rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI in Mexico. Fox has tread carefully during his presidency, keeping his personal convictions at bay: he is against abortion and secular education, he's anti-gay and many women's rights groups in Mexico consider him to be a misogynist. However, as a smart politician, he has used this to his advantage within his party while presenting a different face to the Mexican public, claiming in one speech that he is committed to maintaining the liberty, diversity and pluralism of Mexican society. After PAN ran a homophobic ad that they subsequently pulled, they issed another ad in newspapers that stated that under a Fox administration, people could live in Mexico "without masks."

So one would think that Fox would be smart enough to avoid singling out any particular minority as the one with the people expected to take crappy jobs in the United States. Perhaps Texas' reputation of being a state full of bigots extends in all directions? Maybe he thought that in talking to a group of Texan business leaders, it was like talking to his fellow PAN members behind closed doors? In any case, it doesn't seem very politically adept for Fox to put forth the idea that "brown is the new black" in modern-day America, no matter which side of the border he's on. Blacks are outraged and rightfully so, since the truth of the matter is that Mexicans are taking jobs that nobody particularly wants. What American of any race is thrilled about being a busboy, a maid or the person cleaning Wal-Mart after hours? Mexican immigrants to the United States are taking these jobs because they are better than the jobs they can get within Mexico, pure and simple. They are not fulfilling some noble duty by taking on the undesirable jobs that need to be done but nobody else wants.

Immigration is a complex economic issue with a long history. The American economy has long depended on transient labor whenever the need arises. Once dependence on it lessens, we tend to repatriate Mexicans or raise a stink about how they are "stealing" American jobs. This is the source of the love-hate relationship we have with Mexico and the immigrant labor issue, and by dancing around it in an effort to play nice with the United States, Fox is doing a disservice to both countries. By saying that Blacks are the ones that should be taking these low-paying jobs in America, he has thoroughly confused the issue and obscured any legitimacy that he has in speaking about the real inequities that exist in the labor policies of the United States.

To read more about this story in English, see the Washington Post article.