Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

8/22/01 News Report -- Chicago Tribune

MEXICO CITY -- Caught between a Mexican push to make the free flow of labor part of NAFTA and congressional concerns about legalizing millions of undocumented Mexicans, the Bush administration is moving toward reforms that would strike a middle ground between a full-scale amnesty and a guest worker program, Mexican and U.S. officials and analysts said.

Reportedly under consideration is a plan that would give Mexican workers illegally in the United States, and those on short legal visas, the right to earn points toward a green card and eventual citizenship if they could prove they had worked and paid taxes in the United States for a number of years.

While a deal is far from finished, the effort eventually could benefit up to 2 million undocumented Mexicans, analysts said.

"They are working on something halfway between legalization and a guest worker program, where people would accumulate points toward legalization," said Jorge Bustamante, a Mexican immigration expert from Tijuana's University of the Northern Frontier who is teaching this semester at the University of Notre Dame.

Such a policy would be part of a larger change in U.S. thinking about illegal Mexican migration, long considered a border-enforcement problem but now being recast as a labor supply and demand issue.

"All of the U.S. presidents before Bush who dealt with the issue of undocumented migration have defined it as a criminal issue, one that needs a police solution," Bustamante said. "But Bush sees it as a labor question, and recognizes the demand for that labor in the United States as part of the phenomenon.

"That's an important qualitative change, and without it these kind of negotiations would not have started."

Much of the change in U.S. thinking has been the result of new pressure by Mexican President Vicente Fox, who heads to Washington on Sept. 5 to discuss migration policy with Bush and Congress.

Quest for open border

Fox, who ousted Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party last year, believes the North American Free Trade Agreement, which allows free movement of capital and goods between member nations, should be extended to include labor.

Under his vision, workers eventually would move freely across the U.S.-Mexico border to meet labor demand at U.S. farms, hotels, hospitals and restaurants. Mexican workers in the United States would receive Social Security cards, driver's licenses and basic labor protections; in exchange they would pay taxes and contribute low-cost labor to the U.S. economy.

"It isn't fair to consider them illegal when they are employed, when they are working productively, when they are generating so much for the American economy," Fox said in a recent radio address. "They shouldn't have to walk around like criminals."

While few undocumented Mexican workers file U.S. income tax forms each year, studies suggest that at least half of illegal workers in the United States pay income taxes, usually through paycheck deductions, or property taxes.

Finding middle ground

U.S. officials envision a somewhat different future. Caught between groups that want to see undocumented migrants legalized and others that would prefer to see lawbreakers sent back home, the Bush administration is trying to chart a middle course. Such a course would reward taxpaying, hardworking, long-resident illegal migrants without creating a broad amnesty that might attract new waves of border-crossers.

"We want to make sure the immigration system does not disadvantage American workers," Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the key U.S. negotiators of a new migration accord, said earlier this month.

But at the same time, he said, the U.S. wants to develop with Mexico "a more fair and equitable system that serves the interests of both countries."

U.S. officials, under pressure from U.S. agribusiness and other migrant employers, also may revamp and broaden the country's guest worker program, which now gives short-term agricultural work visas to about 100,000 Mexicans a year.

Under proposals being discussed, the program might be expanded to provide Mexican workers in hotels, restaurants, nursing homes and other health facilities with similar visas, which would prevent them from having to make illegal and often perilous border crossings.

Nearly 1.5 million Mexicans are arrested trying to cross the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border illegally each year, and last year more than 300 died in the inhospitable desert that stretches along much of the border.

'People are needed up there'

"What we want are as many rights for as many people as soon as possible," said Juan Hernandez, the head of Fox's Office on Mexicans Living Abroad. "These people are needed up there. If they couldn't find jobs, they'd come home."

Passing labor migration reforms may prove particularly difficult for the Bush administration in the coming months as the nation's economy limps along at the edge of recession.

Negotiators have downplayed expectations that any deal will be reached by Fox's September visit, and analysts say Congress may prefer to wait until after the 2002 elections to tackle the issue, hoping for an economic upturn by then.

Bush, after floating a trial balloon suggesting he might consider a large-scale amnesty, risks losing political capital with the country's fast-growing Hispanic population if he fails to move forward. Mexican-Americans have long voted Democratic, but Bush's Republicans stand to win new ground if they can put together a successful legalization and labor migration reform package.

'Window of opportunity'

"Bush has been especially attentive to Mexico," said Rafael Fernando de Castro, head of international studies at the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico. "Mexico is his priority. That gives us a window of opportunity to change the terms of migration.

"The Mexican position is a very ambitious one. Mexico's been very aggressive about putting the migration issue on the table," he said. "But that's what Mexico and the United States need: a comprehensive agreement, a different vision of the border and the intent to manage it together."

As part of a joint effort to stem illegal border crossings and promote legal migration, Mexico may create its own system of penalties for border violators if Bush pushes ahead with what is being called "earned regularization" and an expanded guest worker program.

Fox's administration is discussing controversial measures that could deny social security or other benefits to Mexicans who cross the border illegally, Bustamante said. At the least, the Mexican government could deny legal guest worker visas to those who have crossed illegally, he said.

Mexican economy weakening

Fox would prefer to stem illegal migration by creating jobs at home, but Mexico's own slowing economy has made that difficult, at least in the short term. Mexico's economy, closely tied to that of the United States, is expected to grow by less than 2 percent this year.

Hernandez acknowledges that much remains to be worked out before any deal is reached, and that while Bush and Fox would like to announce a plan in September, that probably will be difficult. Still, he is confident the two nations are moving toward an accord.

"We've still got to settle the numbers and see what can be done," Hernandez said. But with U.S.-Mexican relations the warmest in decades, "all the stars are aligned," he said. "I think we're going to get much further than ever before."