Mexico City.– U.S. actor and director Tommy Lee Jones called plans by United States lawmakers to build a high fence all along the border with Mexico "a great stupidity."

"We should take it only for the idiocy it is – a destructive, bad, impractical idea that anyway is not going to happen. Even if they get together enough money to do it, almost anybody can dig a hole under it or blow up a piece of it," the actor, who speaks fluent Spanish, said at a press conference here

Last December the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill to strengthen immigration policy, which contemplates building five walls along the Mexican border to stop the influx of undocumented aliens.

Jones said that "people in politics and in the government (of the United States) trying to make themselves attractive become paranoid, hysterical dealing with issues like the border to identify themselves with a cause and so improve their political job security." He also criticized those in the United States who support civilian groups that patrol the Mexican border hunting immigrants.

Jones was here to present his film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," which premiered Friday in Mexico and with which he made his debut as a director on the big screen.

The movie takes place on the Mexico-United States border, and tells the story of Pete (Jones), a U.S. rancher who after the death of his friend Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedillo), a Mexican cowboy who entered the U.S. without immigration documents, makes a trip to Mexico to bury his friend there according to his wishes.

The bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives envisions building 700 miles of fences along the border with Mexico, makes illegal immigration a crime - it is currently a civil offense - and calls for prosecuting U.S. citizens who aid undocumented migrants.

The measure will be taken up by the Senate this year. Mexico's President Fox has said that "to us the wall seems shameful, to us it seems a wall of that magnitude should not exist in the relationship between Mexico and the United States," and citing the 1989 toppling of the Berlin Wall, added that "walls were left behind in the last century. Walls were torn down by the citizenry itself, they were torn down by the quest for freedom and democracy."