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OKLAHOMA CITY — During a visit to Oklahoma, the former president of Mexico has urged lawmakers to develop sensible immigration reform.

Vicente Fox, who served as Mexico's president from 2000 to 2006, spoke in Oklahoma City and Tulsa on Tuesday at events hosted by Oklahoma State University's Spears School of Business.

Last year, Oklahoma lawmakers passed what has been called the nation's toughest law against illegal immigration, and this year, other state legislatures have examined Oklahoma's law while developing their own proposals.

Such state action wouldn't be necessary if Congress had not failed to act, Fox said.

"At the very end, it's a federal issue so in the end it should be satisfied by the federal government, by the U.S. Congress," Fox said. "Immigration is an asset to every nation. It's an asset to the United States, no doubt. What we need to do is take advantage of that asset by bringing order to it and by bringing legality to it."

Fox's favored plan is similar to one proposed in 2005 by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts. The McCain-Kennedy proposal would have allowed illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. to become legal citizens and provided funding for border security, but it ever came to a floor vote.

Fox said most illegal immigrants from Mexico don't want to become U.S. citizens and plan to return to their homeland someday because "they like better tacos, tortillas and chilies than hot dogs or hamburgers." He thinks a temporary guest worker program would solve many problems.

He said he is opposed to the building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"That's the worst of the answers to a problem that has to be dealt with among different nations," Fox said. "The threat to the United States is not immigration ... The threat to the United States is isolation by building a wall."

About a dozen protesters from a group that calls itself Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise demonstrated outside the Civic Center Music Hall before Fox's Oklahoma City speech. The group is opposed to a closer economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.

"I don't want a North American union established," protester Robert Forrester said. "That's why I'm here."