Immigration Bill 2013: Texas Governor Rick Perry Says Reform Will Become ‘Passe’

An immigration reform bill won't pass in 2013, thinks Texas Governor Rick Perry. Not only that - it's soon going to become a non-issue. Why's that? Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's planned reform of state oil company Pemex, for one. CNN reports that at the Republican Governors Association's annual conference in Arizona on Wednesday, Gov. Perry told reporters, "I think immigration reform is going to be very passé. It's going to be part of the past. And one of the reasons is that is that when Mexico liberalizes the energy policy down there and the Mexicans who are here illegally go home... and as a matter of fact there might be a lot of folks who maybe are U.S. citizens going to Mexico looking for jobs in the energy industry."

Peña Nieto, he said, is "very committed to improving the economic lot in Mexico". "And (at) that particular point in time," the governor added, "this whole discussion about immigration reform, I think it goes away for one thing. And the idea about border security may shift from the United States and Mexico border, down to the Guatemala-Mexican border." He told CNN that the amount of time it would take for the discussion on immigration reform to change would vary depending on "how fast the Congress in Mexico works". But in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, he said it would "change drastically in the next 12 to 24 months."

The Mexican president's proposed reform would amend Mexico's constitution to allow Pemex to enter into shared-risk contracts with foreign oil firms. It's an unpopular one in Mexico, where rights to exploit oil and gas reserves have belonged solely to the state since 1938, when then-president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the properties of Standard Oil and Royal Dutch/Shell after they refused to abide by a supreme court finding in favor of the oil workers' union. Peña Nieto's plan would keep oil and gas deposits in the hands of the Mexican state even after its extraction by foreign firms, which would share part of the profit of the sale. Revenue from Pemex provides the government with about a third of its budget, but Mexican oil deposits are said to be on their last legs - within about 5-7 years, experts say, the country will hit peak oil. Pemex does not currently have the technology to access Mexico's huge deep-water and shale gas reserves.

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