Why No Country Can Stand on Its Own : What’s needed is multilateral regulation of migration

Next month the leaders of the Central American nations and top U.S. and Mexican officials will arrive at the Western Hemisphere summit in Miami prepared to discuss the migration issue. There is no longer any avoiding it.

Almost all parties in this hemisphere realize that the movement of populations across international borders is likely to be a top-table agenda item at any such conference for some time to come. For in the aftermath of passage of California’s Proposition 187, many U.S. politicians--far too many--are scrambling to figure out how to respond nationally to what they see as the will of the people. Or is it simply to exploit political opportunity? Whatever the motive, it now seems obvious that something like Proposition 187 will make it onto the national stage before long.

What’s especially galling to students of hemispherical politics, however, is any suggestion that Mexican authorities have been oblivious to the growing friction. In his final State of the Nation address, outgoing Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari criticized Proposition 187 in no uncertain terms: “Local political interests in California tend to blame Mexican workers for the ills of that society.” The farsighted Salinas added, “Mexico affirms its opposition to that xenophobic campaign and will, in fact, continue defending the labor and human rights of our migrant workers.”

While that necessary stand no doubt pleased many domestic constituencies, it also prompted Mexican human rights authorities to point out that Mexican immigration laws are among the harshest and that no fewer than 60,000 undocumented workers in Mexico--who are often treated not any better, and sometimes worse, than illegal immigrants in the United States--were deported last year alone.

Thus the problem is neither solely a California one nor even a U.S. one but one affecting the hemisphere. This is why real progress toward more humane regulation of migration will not be made and cannot be made by one nation, much less one state. Any such negotiated agreement would not, of course, be a simple matter: Both the U.S. and Mexican constitutions, for instance, offer large guarantees of freedom to travel and emigrate. Even so, what’s needed is some way to regulate the flow of workers across borders--making it aboveboard and legal, eliminating the exploitation that comes with criminality.

We believe that a serious bilateral effort to formulate such an approach would do far more to regulate cross-border migration, relieve domestic tensions and improve Mexican-U.S. relations than all of the grandstanding ideas on both sides of the border. As Times Op-Ed page contributor Jorge Castaneda put it Friday, “Many business and political leaders in Mexico are now espousing the stance that very few (including this writer) staked out during the NAFTA debate: that Mexico should have pressed for a chapter on immigration, even if that meant complicating the treaty’s ratification.”

For its part, The Times has suggested a bilateral accord or some kind of “North American Free Labor Agreement” as a way of controlling the immigration flow. A cross-border labor agreement would only do what NAFTA aims to do with the cross-border movement of capital and goods: better regulate the salutary economic integration that is already taking place among the United States, Mexico and Canada. Such an achievement would be far better than anything else now on the horizon.