Mexico president says Trump border wall idea 'doesn't work'

WASHINGTON, United States — Mexico's president said in an interview broadcast Sunday that Republican Donald Trump's mantra that the US-Mexico border should be walled off is a nonstarter, reiterating his view that only huge US foreign policy changes will stem illegal migration.

Asked by CBS's "60 Minutes" whether Trump, if elected in November, would build the promised wall, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said "no."

"It doesn't work!" he said, speaking through a translator.

The president said that when Trump was last in office and seeking to build a wall, he highlighted for his US counterpart that smugglers had been able to dig tunnels under barriers already in place.

Trump "stayed quiet, and then he started laughing and told me 'I can't win with you,'" Lopez Obrador said.

The Mexican president's remarks on Trump as well as Joe Biden come as the two US political foes face a rematch of their 2020 bout, with illegal immigration once again an explosive campaign issue.

Trump and his Republican party have attempted to bludgeon Biden over recent record numbers of migrants crossing the southern US border, while the Democrat faces backlash in his own camp over negotiations to tighten immigration policy.

Lopez Obrador, 70, said that after a request from Biden, he helped to secure a temporary dip early this year in the surge of undocumented migrants trying to get into the United States.

He said that was partly due to Mexico being "more careful" about its own southern border, and that he had enlisted the help of Central American leaders.

"However, that is a short-term solution, not a long-term one," he said, adding that Mexico wants "the root causes to be attended to, for them to be seriously looked at.”

Lopez Obrador has told the White House that Washington should spend billions each year to alleviate poverty in Latin America, ease sanctions on the far-left governments in Venezuela and Cuba and grant legal status to millions of Mexicans living in the United States.

Without such sweeping reforms, though, "the flow of migrants… will continue," Lopez Obrador said.

Responding to growing Republican demands for the border to be closed off as an emergency solution, Lopez Obrador cited the economic dependency each country has for the other.

"You would not be able to buy inexpensive cars if the border is closed. That is, you would have to pay $10,000, $15,000 dollars more for a car. There are factories in Mexico and there are factories in the United States that are fundamental for all the consumers in the United States and all the consumers in Mexico."

The president, who leaves office later this year, was also pressed on several domestic issues in the interview, notably a recent scandal in which he revealed the personal phone number of a reporter.

When asked why he would do such a thing in a country where reporters are frequently harassed and murdered, Lopez Obrador said he "had no intention of harming her," but was "responding to a libel."

"Imagine what it means for this reporter to write that the president of Mexico has connections with drug traffickers… And without having any proof. That is a vile slander," he said.