Ex-Mexican president addresses Darden

Vicente Fox, the immediate past president of Mexico, on Tuesday praised his successor’s leadership amid the swine flu crisis that has sickened more than 1,600 and killed 152 in Mexico.

Fox — who spoke at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration — said Mexican President Felipe Calderon has made difficult, yet necessary, decisions, such as closing all the nation’s schools and most of its public places.

“I think he’s doing a great job,” Fox said. “He’s moving fast. He’s taking courageous decisions, difficult to take. We all hope that this will be under control soon.”

National and international health agencies, he said, are racing to develop a vaccine for the strain of flu that has spread around the globe, apparently infecting people in more than two dozen countries.

“Every single effort has to be going to refrain, to limit the expansion,” Fox said. “We have to work hard, like President Calderon and all of Mexico are doing, and we have to wait on the technology.”

Crises such as the swine flu epidemic and the global economic downturn, Fox said, are absorbing much of the time of the leaders of Mexico and the United States. Yet, he said, the leaders of these countries must also keep pushing to expand free trade throughout the Americas, curtail drug trafficking and implement immigration reform in the United States.

Fox was highly critical of the fence under construction along the border between the United States and Mexico that aims to restrict illegal immigration. The fence, he said, will not work and will be a barrier to trade.

“Walls are to isolate yourself,” he said. “So the question is, what is the fear?”

Fox said he understands there is xenophobia in parts of the United States and that there are worries that Latin Americans will take jobs from Americans. But, he argued, the majority of the immigrants are entering the United States to fill jobs that Americans are generally not willing to perform.

Mexico and the United States, he said, are “partners in growth” that must work together to grow their economies. “No nation by itself today can accomplish its dreams and objectives unless they’re working with others,” he said.

In 2001, President George W. Bush visited Fox at his ranch in Mexico and Bush agreed to work toward reforming the United States’ immigration policies. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, however, those plans were derailed. President Barack Obama has said that he intends to make immigration reform a priority.

Fox said he hopes the United States will decide what to do with the illegal immigrants, whom he called hardworking contributors to America’s economy.

“A decision has to be made about those 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country,” he said.

Moreover, he said, he wants the United States to stop deporting parents while their children remain. And he believes Latin Americans working in the United States should be allowed to travel back and forth over the border to visit family.

“It cannot go on, this criminal act of breaking families,” he said.

Fox’s speech was disrupted momentarily by a silent protester who held a sign in opposition to “Plan Mexico,” the name by which critics refer to the Merida Initiative, a security pact enacted in 2008 between the United States and Mexico. As part of the agreement, the United States provides Mexico with training and supplies to combat drug trafficking and other crimes.

The protester, wearing a blue bandana over his face, then left the auditorium without comment.

Darden’s Latin American Student Association sponsored Fox’s address. Darden Dean Robert Bruner said Fox is the embodiment of the business school’s goal of creating principled leaders in a world of practical affairs.