For his first international foray of 2023, United States President Joe Biden has swung down to Mexico City to attend the latest iteration of the North American Leaders’ Summit, charmingly dubbed the “Three Amigos Summit”.
The meeting is kicking off on January 9 with a bilateral encounter between Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO. The third “amigo” is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
One major topic for friendly discussion between Biden and AMLO will inevitably be migration, as the US continues to battle a “migrant crisis” of unprecedented proportions – a crisis that would hardly be so critical if the US simply refrained from messing up other people’s countries in the first place.
As of the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2022, there had been no fewer than 2.38 million apprehensions of undocumented people on the US-Mexico border, an increase of 37 percent from the previous year. Between September 2021 and June 2022, meanwhile, Mexico detained a record 345,584 people transiting its territory, most of them en route to the US.
As the long-dead Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz is said to have once observed: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States” – a proximity that in recent decades has meant that Mexico gets to perform the anti-migrant dirty work of its northern neighbour, self-appointed proprietor of the world’s number-one Very Important Border. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.