Mexico: Mexico will under no circumstances pay for the border wall that US presidential candidate Donald Trump has proposed building to stop illegal immigration, the Mexican finance minister said.
"Let me say this emphatically and categorically: under no circumstances is Mexico going to pay for the wall that Mr Trump is proposing," Finance Minister Luis Videgaray told TV network Milenio.
"Building a wall between Mexico and the United States is a terrible idea, based on ignorance, and has no basis in the reality of North American integration," he said in the interview late Wednesday.
Trump, who leads the race for the Republican nomination, has railed against immigrants and especially immigration from Mexico, accusing the country of sending drug dealers and rapists to the United States.
At his campaign launch in June, the flamboyant billionaire vowed to build a wall along the border and make Mexico pay for it.
Videgaray dismissed any such possibility, saying Mexican government funds were "to benefit Mexicans."
"We have enormous needs and much more important uses for the public budget," he said.
He added that "no benefit" could come from building a wall along a border that sees more than one million legal crossings a day and across which the two countries do $1 million a minute in trade.
