Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon said on Thursday the flow of illegal workers to the United States would not stop, saying the two countries needed to work together to solve the problem, according to Reuters. A court this week named Calderon winner of the July presidential election after throwing out fraud claims by his leftist rival. Calderon, from the same conservative party as President Vicente Fox, is expected to be a U.S. ally in Latin America, but he warned that U.S. lawmakers should recognize that illegal immigration was a fact of life. "We can't ignore it. We can't make it disappear by decree," he told foreign journalists. "We have to find sensible mechanisms between the two countries to solve the problem jointly." U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said on Wednesday Republicans were dropping efforts to pass a bill before the November midterm elections that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to eventual citizenship. Congress would focus instead on border security. Activists supporting comprehensive immigration measures gathered in Washington on Thursday for a march but their hopes for a massive rally with tens of thousands of marchers seemed unlikely to materialize. Calderon who takes power on Dec. 1, also urged Washington to curb narcotics consumption in the United States to help Mexico in its fight against drug gangs. "A greater commitment by American authorities to reducing drug-taking and the demand is essential. Otherwise, this issue is never going to end," he said. More than 1,000 people have been killed this year in a gang war for control of smuggling routes into the United States. The scale of the crime challenge facing Calderon was gruesomely highlighted on Wednesday when 20 masked gunmen burst into a bar in the western city of Uruapan and dumped five human heads on the dance floor. The killing, in Calderon's home state of Michoacan, was apparently in revenge for earlier drug murders.
