Guatemala's comedian president offers Trump 'cheap labor' to build his border wall

Jimmy Morales, the president of Guatemala. (AP Photo/Luis Soto)

While Mexican leaders have emphatically denounced Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s call to build a wall along the United States’ southern border, Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales is offering a helping hand.

In a Spanish-language interview with the New York Times en Español, Morales – a TV comedian before getting elected to the country's highest office – said that he is offering the billionaire businessman bargain workers to build his proposed wall.

"To the gentleman who wants to build a wall, I offer cheap labor," Morales said during the interview, according to the Hill. "We have high-quality labor, and we'll gladly build it … Tell us the dimensions, and we have the know-how."

Morales, who assumed the post of Guatemala’s president earlier this year, took a more serious approach when discussing the broader topic of stemming the flow of migrants to the U.S.

"We will contribute,” he said. “Although I have no reason to involve myself in U.S. migratory policy — we believe that it is necessary to think about migratory reform so that many of the people who are there in an irregular manner can be regularized."

Immigration has been one of the most hotly-debated issues on the campaign trail in the U.S. presidential election ever since Trump lambasted Mexican migrants last summer and has continued to make a strict border policy a keystone of his campaign.

"Illegal immigration is going to stop," Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Arizona. "It's dangerous. Terrible."

In Morales' interview, the Central American head of state said the U.S. would benefit from granting undocumented immigrants legal status as they would "contribute more and pay more taxes."

Morales, however, noted that his country was losing “human talent” to the U.S. and that his government is working on a series of programs to promote employment in the Central American nation that would keep Guatemalans in the country.

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