United Provinces of Mexico

I'm glad companies provide the courtesy of allowing me to press one if I need to speak using my language, but it's simply not necessary.  I realized if you don't speak Spanish then you're an uneducated minority and you should integrate into the broader Hispanic culture of America.  I got my car fixed by an all Spanish speaking auto shop that sold Mexican food on the side, and I felt quite ignorant for not being able to communicate in their language.

Fast food giant Burger King apologized Tuesday for an advertisement featuring a squat Mexican draped in his country's flag next to a tall American cowboy and said it would change the campaign.

Mexico's ambassador to Spain said posters released in Europe for Burger King's new Tex-Mex style "Texican whopper," a cheeseburger with chile and spicy mayonnaise, inappropriately displayed the Mexican flag, whose image is protected under national law.

The ambassador wrote a letter complaining to Burger King and requested the ad campaign be discontinued.

Burger King said the ads were meant to show a mixture of influences from the southwestern United States and Mexico, not to poke fun at Mexican culture, but said it would replace them "as soon as commercially possible."

"Burger King Corporation has made the decision to revise the Texican Whopper advertising creative out of respect for the Mexican culture and its people," it said in a statement.

"The existing campaign falls fully within the legal parameters of the United Kingdom and Spain where the commercials are being aired and were not intended to offend anyone," the company added.

A TV version of the ad shows the strapping cowboy and the pint-sized Mexican wrestler -- nicknamed "Just a Little Bit" -- living together as roommates. At one point, the American lifts up the Mexican to help him put a trophy on a high shelf.

Mexico was involved in another controversial ad campaign last year when Absolut vodka posted billboard ads in Mexico with an early 19th century map showing chunks of the United States as part of Mexico.

The campaign angered many U.S. citizens and was later dropped.

Alan Bersin, a former Justice Department official who led a 1990s crackdown on illegal border crossings was named to the new U.S. post of "border czar" Wednesday to oversee efforts to end drug-cartel violence along the U.S.-Mexico border and to slow the tide of illegal immigration.

The Obama administration has promised to target border violence and work with Mexican authorities to curb drug and arms trafficking. Hundreds of federal agents, along with high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs, are being deployed to the Southwest.

But Bersin, speaking in both Spanish and English, immediately cautioned against the exaggeration of the drug cartels' threat to residents of U.S. border states.

"We should be very cautious to not ... misstate the security situation," Bersin said. He noted that there had been no direct spillover of the violence seen in northern Mexico, although cartel-affiliated drug and immigrant traffickers have engaged in kidnapping and other crimes farther north of the border.

The new assistant Homeland Security secretary for international affairs also rejected calls by state officials and others to place troops on the U.S. side of the Mexican border.

"The posse comitatus have served this country well," he said, referring to laws that prevent the U.S. military from operating as law enforcement within the U.S.

Last year, customs officials apprehended 792,321 people who tried to get into the U.S. through the Southwest border, and immigration officials removed more than 369,000, according to Homeland Security statistics.

During his final three years with the Justice Department, Bersin doubled as the Southwest border representative for the attorney general. Under his watch, the U.S. rolled out Operation Gatekeeper, a massive increase in border enforcement in the San Diego area; the program discouraged illegal crossings there, but migrants and smugglers reacted by choosing less populated routes to the east.

Hispanic groups decried the appointment and said Operation Gatekeeper caused a steep increase in deaths by forcing immigrants to attempt treacherous mountain and desert crossings into the United States.

"President Obama could not have selected a more qualified, more experienced person to join his administration — especially when it comes to issues along our southwest border," Schwarzenegger said.

How long until everyone in the US is an illegal immigrant? Only time will tell.