How Does Mexico Treat Its Illegal Aliens?

Mark Daniels points us to an AP story on illegal aliens...in Mexico:

Considered felons by the government, these migrants fear detention, rape and robbery. Police and soldiers hunt them down at railroads, bus stations and fleabag hotels. Sometimes they are deported; more often officers simply take their money.

While migrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

And though Mexico demands humane treatment for its citizens who migrate to the U.S., regardless of their legal status, Mexico provides few protections for migrants on its own soil. The issue simply isn't on the country's political agenda, perhaps because migrants make up only 0.5 percent of the population, or about 500,000 people -- compared with 12 percent in the United States.

The level of brutality Central American migrants face in Mexico was apparent Monday, when police conducting a raid for undocumented migrants near a rail yard outside Mexico City shot to death a local man, apparently because his dark skin and work clothes made officers think he was a migrant.

Virginia Sanchez, who lives near the railroad tracks that carry Central Americans north to the U.S. border, said such shootings in Tultitlan are common.

''At night, you hear the gunshots, and it's the judiciales (state police) chasing the migrants,'' she said. ''It's not fair to kill these people. It's not fair in the United States and it's not fair here.''

Remember the uproar that resulted when the House passed a bill that would make illegal aliens in the U.S. felons? We've had to tolerate two or three weeks of demonstrations, walkouts, etc. Illegal aliens are felons in Mexico, and yet the Mexican government complains about our efforts to criminalize illegal entry into the U.S. (not to mention stopping them outright with a decent border fence).

At least we're not trying to shoot them.