Border Politics Begin at Home

In September, President Bush will welcome his counterpart from Mexico, Vicente Fox, to Washington. The two presidents will be deliberating how to move forward on issues important to both countries, with the issue of immigration at the top of the list. Binationalism between the United States and Mexico and bipartisanship between Democrats and Republicans must be center-stage for the meeting to be productive.

From a public policy perspective, President Bush is right to engage the migration issue, which could legalize the status of potentially millions of Mexican and other foreign workers now in the U.S. It is not simply an issue of poor people trying to gain a foothold in a rich country. The U.S. needs increased immigration to sustain economic growth as baby boomers retire. This position is endorsed by voices as diverse as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the AFL-CIO.

From a political point of view, the president is also on target. Latinos represent the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group, so both Republicans and Democrats see valuable votes to be mined. After all, a commanding bloc of election day prizes--California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas--have Mexican American communities making up about 20% of the population.

Where the heat comes from is in defining migration reform. Is it throwing open the citizenship gates to anyone in the country, legal or otherwise? Is it a narrowly defined, restrictive set of rules that let only a few gain legal standing in the U.S.? Is it for immigrants from Mexico only?

The Bush White House has yet to detail how far it is willing to go. Considerations have swung from whispering the word “amnesty,” which could eventually make all undocumented Mexicans living here--as many as 4.5 million people --legal U.S. citizens, to a guest-worker program, which would provide legal standing to some workers, though not citizenship.

Democrats are, as expected, moving toward a policy closer to the first option, seeking to push Republicans into a reflexively anti-immigration position.

But a politically realistic, nonpartisan blueprint does exist, provided by the nongovernmental U.S.-Mexico Migration Panel, which six months ago offered Presidents Bush and Fox new approaches to an old problem.

The essential elements are to “make legal status more widely available for established, employed and taxpaying (but undocumented) immigrants, expand permanent family visas for [people from] Mexico, make work visas more widely available.” Exactly how this is to be achieved, and whether 50,000 or 5 million people would become legal U.S. residents, has to be worked out by policymakers on both sides of the border.

The goals are to shut off the engine of illegal migration, to help Mexico retain its own talent and to ensure the U.S. an adequate, reliable and secure work force. This in turn could end the deaths of migrants trying to cross the border and the instances of divided families and forfeited workers’ rights.

There is only one way to achieve this and to turn the U.S.-Mexico border into a multibillion-dollar link for energy and talent and not simply a wellspring for problems. Give full standing and protection under U.S. law to workers (and their families) who have been in the U.S. paying taxes, contributing to the economy and living legally in every way except for possessing a green card. Consider that in the past decade, men and women working in the U.S. illegally have paid what some estimate to be $20 billion in Social Security taxes but never collected the benefits due them as U.S. taxpayers.

Will the Bush administration expend the political capital to keep migration from being this week’s version of campaign finance reform--a good idea in the public interest, squandered? The president has the bully pulpit and deserves credit for giving the migration issue attention and momentum. But the same rules that apply to his talks with President Fox must also reside in his interaction with congressional Democrats for this to work: One’s success cannot come at the other’s expense.