Mexico wants a North American EU.

"I would like to see a border similar to the one that Europe has right now ... where they have common, very common objectives," stated Mexican Foreign Ministry official Arturo Gonzalez Cruz in a recent Tijuana interview. Mexico's "border Czar" pointed out that members of the European Union "have a common economy. They have policies that transcend their borders...." In a report describing Gonzalez's remarks, the Washington Times noted: "Travel across national borders in the European Union is unregulated, and citizens of EU member nations traverse borders as freely and easily as Americans cross state lines."

Mexican President Vicente Fox, continued the Times, "has said he favors open borders across North America and has proposed removing all immigration barriers between Mexico, the United States and Canada, allowing the three nations' citizens to live and work in the country of their choosing. At a rally in California after his surprise 2000 election, Mr. Fox said his government would 'use all our persuasion and all our talent to bring together the U.S., Canadian and Mexican governments so that in five or ten years, the border is totally open to the free movement of workers.'"

As we have previously noted in these pages, Fox used a May 2002 address in Madrid, Spain, to urge the expansion of NAFTA into "an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union." The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would broaden and deepen that three-nation economic and political bloc, eventually encompassing a total of 34 nations--every Western Hemisphere country with the exception, for now, of Communist Cuba.

Developing that EU-style "ensemble of connections" between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada was the theme of the September international conference of the Border Trade Alliance in Mexico City. The BTA describes itself as a "network of public and private sector representatives" organized to act as "a voice before our NAFTA governments." In his keynote address, Angel Villalobos Rodriguez, Mexico's under-secretary for international trade negotiations, pointed out that "NAFFA launched an era of political, economic and social intimacy between the U.S. and Mexico that had not existed before."