Mexican President Enters Eye of the Immigration Storm

The new Mexican president who advocates opening the border is stumping the American state where voters have loudly proclaimed they want the border plugged.

Controlled. Respected.

Come north legally or not at all, they insist. “There’s a right way and a wrong way,” as former Gov. Pete Wilson used to say.

Wilson was demonized by Democrats and Mexicans. But the overwhelming majority of California voters agreed with him. They passed Proposition 187 by 59% to 41%. That was seven years ago during a deep recession. But there’s little doubt Prop. 187 would pass again today.

“Are the sentiments still there? Yeah, I think they are,” says Gov. Gray Davis’ pollster, Paul Maslin. “It would probably pass again.”

Voters saw it as a matter of fairness, not nativism. They didn’t think it right that 100,000 immigrants were sneaking in illegally every year and costing taxpayers $3.6 billion annually for services.

That was the best guess then. Turns out, Prop. 187’s backers didn’t know the half of it, according to an analysis of the 2000 census reported recently by The Times. The new data suggests that the U.S. has about double the number of illegal immigrants previously thought--possibly 11 million or more--and 40% of them live in California.

The result: Heavy pressure on public services--especially schools--and employer exploitation of the oversupply of low-skilled, illegal immigrant workers.

California voters, again, were ahead of the politically correct crowd.

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But neither side--Mexican President Vicente Fox nor California voters--will have their way completely.

Prop. 187 was doomed as policy, although it did make for a nice bullhorn. It wasn’t designed to control the border; that’s a federal responsibility. Rather, it sought to cut off public services for illegal immigrants. Much was shucked by courts. Some was enacted into federal law by welfare and immigration reforms.

As for Fox’s goal, Americans will not be sanctioning unregulated immigration. There’ll be no open border. Not in the foreseeable future. But the Mexican leader is onto something.

Migration is a fact of life, Fox and many Americans note. Why not make it organized, safe, legal, based on labor needs? End the migrant-smuggling gangs and worker exploitation.

“We should perceive of the border as more of a joining line than a dividing line,” Fox told a joint session of the Legislature Wednesday.

Congress could authorize a new amnesty and reform a present system that is out of control. Maybe create more than a guest-worker program, which would require migrants to return home after the harvest and be hard to enforce.

U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) has been developing a plan that would allow migrant field hands to gradually work their way, after a few years, into permanent green card status. Meanwhile, they would be legal temporary residents.

Is illegal immigration a problem? “Absolutely,” says the liberal congressman.

“It’s unfair to people waiting to come legally. Every country should be able to control its borders. It creates a class of exploitable workers who are used to bust unions. They’re kept in the shadows, doing essential work for us and treated almost as indentured servants.

“Growers always want to scream ‘shortage,’ but in reality what they want is an oversupply of labor to keep wages down and discourage unionization.”

Organized labor--including United Farm Workers--also has come to that conclusion after historically opposing an imported work force. The new logic: Legalize and unionize.

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Fox, accompanied by Davis, will address an estimated 5,000 Latinos this morning in Fresno, heart of the farm belt. More than anything, this is a political barnstorm for both the Mexican president and California governor.

Nearly one-third of Californians are Latinos. Their influence on state politics is growing. In Mexico, there’s a movement to allow citizens living abroad to vote. That could affect 3 million California residents.

“Supporting immigrants plays extremely well in Mexico,” notes Raul Hinojosa, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA. “Every single family in Mexico has a relative in the U.S. And Fox is going to spend a lot of time with those relatives.”

In California, the professor adds, Fox also is building a support base for the agenda he’ll be lobbying in Washington.

That includes “a substantial increase” in worker visas, he says. “You don’t have to make it an open border.”

Make it controllable. Fair. Legal. And Californians will support it.