President Barack Obama, in meetings with Mexican President Felipe Calderon over the weekend, promised that he will find a way to meet the U.S.' commitment to open the border to Mexican trucks under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

After Congress in March passed a bill cutting off a pilot program allowing cross-border trucking, citing safety concerns, the Mexican government slapped $2.4 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the crossing was supposed to have been opened to border-state traffic in 1995 and to long-distance traffic in 2000. The opening was stalled until 2007, in part by difficult negotiations with Mexico, but mainly by the legislative and legal tactics of U.S. labor, owner-operator and citizen advocacy groups who fear loss of U.S. jobs to Mexican drivers and argue that Mexican trucks will not be safe.

The meeting was part of a North American summit that also featured Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In a press conference Monday, Obama said, "First, we agreed that we had to work together to restore our common prosperity. ... Because so much of our common prosperity and millions of jobs depend on trade that flows across our borders -- billions of dollars worth of trade every day -- we reaffirmed the need to reject protectionism. ... We are among each other's largest trading partners. As we work together towards lasting prosperity, we need to expand that trade, not restrict it."

An unnamed senior Obama administration official told Reuters, "I think there's been a clear understanding that [the cross border trucking issue] was one that is a priority issue and one that everyone would like to see resolved as quickly as possible."

Obama and Calderon met in April and announced that they are committed to resolve the fight over long-distance cross-border trucking between the U.S. and Mexico, but could not provide any details on how they would do so.

In May, we reported that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had a plan he hope to take to Congress for clearance in June. His aim was to address the concerns about safety that Congress cited when it cut off funding for the Bush administration's limited cross-border program. LaHood did not go into details but did say that the plan he put together after consulting with some 30 members of Congress addresses their concerns about safety.

"Almost everything we have done within the proposal has to do with safety," he said. "There's good metrics for testing safety on the mechanical part of the trucks, good metrics for judging whether drivers are complying with the hours of service (and) good metrics to determine if drivers have licenses that have been issued according to all the rules and regulations."

The Washington Times reported late last month that the new proposal to reopen the border to select Mexican carriers has gone through all the interagency channels and will be passed along to Capitol Hill for a vote.

U.S. business groups have been pressing the administration to resolve the issue. Frank Vargo, vice president for international economic affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers, told Reuters that his group calculates there are 15,000 jobs at risk, and the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that Mexican buyers will shift to Mexican-based suppliers.