TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie said he has no plans to visit the border when he travels to Mexico next week, even though he's criticized President Obama for not doing so.

The Republican governor has slammed President Obama's administration of doing an "awful job" securing the Mexico-U.S. border. He has also admonished the Democratic president for declining to make a trip there as thousands of undocumented children from Central America crossed the border into the U.S. in recent months, saying it shows an "unwillingness to lead."

But despite being a potential 2016 candidate for the White House, Christie said Thursday there's no point in him making such a visit. That, he said, is the president's job.

"What would I do exactly? Like, you know, bring troops with me or something? I mean come on," Christie said during a news conference in Sea Bright. "This is silliness. If I went down there and looked at it, what steps am I supposed to take exactly? Send the New Jersey National Guard there?"

For Christie, the trip will mark the second time in his five-year tenure as governor that he's visited Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto. He'll lead a delegation of New Jersey officials and business leaders on a three-day trip beginning Wednesday. He is also slated to meet with the nation's finance and energy ministers.

The governor has declined to say whether he'll talk about immigration with them, stressing that the goal of the trip is to bolster economic relations between New Jersey and Mexico.

"Whatever issues they want to talk about I'll be happy to discuss, but my thrust down there is to try and strengthen our economic ties," Christie said. "That's what my agenda is."

New Jersey exported more than $2.1 billion in goods to Mexico last year and imported more than $3.4 billion the same year, according to Christie's administration.

Another thing Christie said he won't do during the trip: speak Spanish.

"You have to know what you're good at and what you're not good at," he said. "I have never been really good at foreign languages. I tried in high school. I tried in college. And I never had an aptitude for it.

"I think the worst thing in the world is when politicians try to fake it," the governor added. "You know they've got a few things written in a foreign language and they say it and they sound stupid and everybody knows they don't really know what they're talking about. I'm not going to do that."

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