Mexico Offers Legal Status to Migrants as Example for U.S.

Mexico is offering to grant legal status to thousands of undocumented Central American migrant workers, a senior official said Thursday, just as it is asking the United States to do for Mexican immigrants.

Felipe de Jesus Preciado, the director of migration in President Vicente Fox’s government, said the “regularization program” is expected to grant amnesty to about 10,000 migrants, nearly all of them from Central America.

Speaking with foreign correspondents, Preciado said the program will be open for six months starting March 1 and is available to workers who entered Mexico illegally before Jan. 1, 2000. The legalization offer also is open to undocumented family members of legal residents, as long as the family members arrived in Mexico by that date.

Mexico is pressing U.S. officials to consider a similar legalization of the status of Mexican migrants who work in the United States--without doubt a far greater number than that Mexico plans to recognize. Several members of the U.S. Congress also are backing the idea of offering legal residency to long-established migrants with jobs or family ties.

Such a proposal is certain to be part of the negotiations between the two countries set in motion last week when President Bush visited Fox in Mexico.

The Mexican president promised Thursday to try to get the U.S. to legalize Mexican immigrants by the end of the year, the Associated Press reported.

Fox told a group of farmers in the northern state of Durango that Bush last week indicated his commitment to work with him on such a plan.

The Mexican legalization offer “can be interpreted as saying that we shouldn’t ask for what we are not willing to offer ourselves,” Preciado said.

He said that Mexico also offered a legalization program last year but that bureaucratic constraints limited its reach. This time, ambassadors from Central American countries are getting involved in promoting the amnesty program.

Preciado, a former congressman from Fox’s National Action Party, said Mexico has received a swell of migrants from Central America in recent months, partly spurred by the havoc of two major earthquakes in El Salvador.

He added that more than 400 citizens of Ecuador have been detained so far this year on the southern border, apparently a result of recent economic turmoil in the South American country.

Last year, Mexico sent home 153,000 Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans who were arrested trying to cross the southern border, government figures show.

In the same year, 1.1 million Mexicans who entered the U.S. illegally were repatriated, up from 853,000 in 1995, according to Mexican migration records.

Mexico estimates that about 3 million of the 8.3 million Mexicans living in the United States are undocumented.

Preciado noted that Mexico’s effectiveness at guarding its southern border affects the nation’s northern neighbor directly because many who cross intend to continue on to the United States.

He said the tightened U.S. border controls mean that more Central Americans who make it to Mexico tend to remain there because it has become so much harder to cross the northern border.