Fox warns that U.S. labor need will grow

With the looming retirement from the work force of the U.S. baby boom generation, and with Mexico's population-growth rate declining, immigration from Mexico will slow just as demand for workers in the United States will be growing, he told Knight Ridder.

"I am absolutely convinced that by 2010, the United States will have a great demand for workers and laborers to sustain its economy and to sustain its population of retirees and pensioners," the president said. "And in that very year, Mexico will need its young people to help its own economy and to attend to its own retirees."

When Fox took office in 2000, he vowed to make an immigration accord with the United States a top priority, and he thought he had a likely partner in President Bush, who took office less than two months later. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks derailed Bush's plans for an immigration accord as the United States adopted a national-security view of border issues.

Now, in the final months of his six-year term — Mexico limits presidents to one term — Fox shows no disappointment as he suggests that the two sides eventually will come to terms with the realities of migration, even if no accord is reached before he leaves office Dec. 1 or before the U.S. elections in 2008.

"Yes, we have sought an immigration accord for 80 years. It hasn't been reached in 80 years. However, today, we are closer than ever," Fox said.

Mexican growth rate slowing

Demographic experts said Fox was at least partly right. The rate of Mexico's population growth has slowed, from 1.4 percent annually in 2000 to 0.99 percent today. That means that fewer Mexicans will be joining the work force, making it easier for them to find work at home.

"What Fox is saying is that the supply push will go down, for demographic reasons, and that's correct," said Philip Martin, an agricultural economist and expert on immigrant labor at the University of California-Davis. "Instead of a million people turning 15 every year, it will drop to somewhere between 600,000 and 650,000 by 2015."

But the pull of jobs in the United States still might draw Mexicans across the border, especially as the wave of some 76 million baby boomers begins reaching retirement age in 2011.

"Just because there are fewer people coming into the work force, you can still have lots of people who want to leave and go abroad," said Martin, co-author of "The New Rural Poverty" (Urban Institute Press, 2006), which examines how poor immigrant workers are changing the landscape of rural America.