Reply #18: Don't worry, President Fox says things will chagne.

[Bridget Burke]

U.S. will clamor for Mexican workers in coming years, Fox says

By Kevin G. HallKnight Ridder Newspapers

ABOARD THE PRESIDENTE JUAREZ - Flying high above the Yucatan peninsula, Mexican President Vicente Fox leaned forward and pointed a finger to make this point: In a few years, he said, the United States may be begging Mexico for the very workers it's now trying to keep out by building a wall along the border.

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 in an interview aboard his presidential jet.

"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." ......

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 in the future, making it easier for them to find work in their own country. Fewer will feel pushed to the United States.

"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."

www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/13993091.htm