U.S.-Mexico Migration Plan Urged

A U.S.-Mexican panel Wednesday urged Presidents Bush and Vicente Fox to craft a migration strategy that would meet both nations’ labor needs and defuse tensions over illegal Mexican migration to the United States.

The group’s study was issued just two days before Bush is to visit Mexico for the first meeting between the two new presidents. Both have said migration will be a key theme of their talks.

The study, commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, said a comprehensive new strategy should match Mexico’s surplus of young workers with U.S. industry’s shortage of unskilled labor.

The 20-member panel argued that the United States and Mexico should exploit a “window of demographic opportunity” that will exist for the next 15 years or so.

Among the specific proposals: Create more opportunities for legal temporary work in the United States, legalize more Mexicans who have lived without permission for years in the U.S., crack down on organized-crime syndicates that smuggle migrants, and work jointly to reduce the number of migrants who die trying to cross the 2,100-mile frontier.

The panel recommended that, as a goodwill gesture, the U.S. government should freeze the building of additional fences along the border while the new strategy is worked out. Tougher border controls since 1993 have drastically increased the number of deaths of migrants trying to cross, to more than 300 a year.

Mexicans see Bush as sympathetic to their concerns, given the contacts he built with Mexico while governor of Texas. Fox, who took office Dec. 1 as Mexico’s first president in seven decades not from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, raised migration and border issues as a key theme for his presidency.

“This is a window of opportunity to seize the moment and start building a long-term solution,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute who helped write the report.

Separately, a coalition of rights groups known as the Mexico-U.S. Advocates Network wrote to Bush and Fox urging that human rights and family well-being be incorporated into migration policy. The Chicago-based group said the policy should include legalization of undocumented Mexicans already in the United States.

About 8.5 million Mexican-born people live in the United States, 3 million of them illegally, said Rodolfo Tuiran, head of Mexico’s National Population Council and a respected demographer on the U.S.-Mexican panel.

He said about 150,000 Mexicans a year enter the U.S. legally and then overstay their visas. Just as many arrive illegally, resulting in a net loss to Mexico of about 300,000 people annually, most between the ages of 15 and 44.

Tuiran said these migrants have played a major role in maintaining the low inflation rate in the U.S. by filling laborer jobs during a record growth period.

“In the next 10 to 15 years, there is a demographic window of opportunity where the interests of the two countries coincide,” Tuiran said. “Mexico has lots of young people willing to work, and the U.S. population is aging. Thereafter, Mexico will start to face the same aging issues.”

U.S. legislators, led by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), have said they will soon propose a bill to allow up to 250,000 Mexicans to receive short-term visas to carry out farm work and other manual labor.

But Jorge Santibanez, rector of the Northern Border College in Tijuana, said no single program will resolve the migration problem.

“The approach must be long-term and integrated,” he said. “It should include work visas, family unification visas, a whole package.”

The study also suggests that Mexico and Canada be excluded from a U.S. immigration formula limiting visas per country to 25,620 a year, because of the integration of the three nations under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Legalizing more Mexican workers in the United States could boost their wages as much as 20%, which would probably mean a rise in the annual remittances of migrants to their families back home, now estimated at more than $6 billion, the report added.