Whatever Happened to the Migrant Invasion?

Remember, it was only seven years ago, in the summer of 1994, that California found itself in a fever over illegal immigrants. Gov. Pete Wilson’s reelection campaign was airing commercials that depicted undocumented Mexicans dashing across the border, as the announcer intoned: They keep coming.

Like the Martian flying saucers of sci-fi flicks.

Like ants on the march to steal California’s sugar.

They keep coming!

They keep coming!

The governor himself took to referring to those who would come to pick tomatoes or bus tables as “invaders.” Playing catch-up, politicians from both parties began to toss about lunatic ideas, such as deploying National Guard troops along the southern border, or walling off Mexico with a 2,000-mile fence. All of which made for winning, albeit short-term, politics.

After the summer of 1994, California voters not only reelected Wilson, but they also voted by landslide margins to pass a law that would banish children of undocumented workers from schools. As with most major California ballot measures, the passage of Proposition 187 was touted by political analysts as a model of what was to come for the rest of the country.

For Californians who experienced the summer of 1994, the images and sound bites coming from Washington on Wednesday were strange indeed, almost jarring. There was the president of Mexico being greeted, not by an impregnable iron fence, but with elaborate ceremony and a 21-gun salute. And there was the president of the United States talking, not of “invaders,” but of “good neighbors.”

President George W. Bush, to state the obvious, has a different view of border relations than that of Pete Wilson or any of the other politicians who hopped aboard the Good Ship Xenophobia in the mid-1990s. It’s been one of the most fascinating aspects of Bush’s early presidency, this determination to treat Mexico as something other than a nuisance, a southern drag on our golden dreams.

Compared to conventional United States political practice--and, especially, to the shrill rhetoric of 1994--Bush talks about Mexico and Mexicans in a way that seems absolutely foreign. Two weeks ago, for example, he stepped outside his ranch house in Crawford, Texas, to take a few questions from reporters. At one point they asked Bush about his proposal to provide some form of amnesty to undocumented Mexicans working in the United States. Wouldn’t he be rewarding illegal behavior?

That, Bush conceded, “is an important issue. . . . How do we make sure that, as we facilitate willing employer hooking up with willing employee, that we don’t penalize those who have been waiting in line legally? And so our deliberations are taking that into account. And that’s a far cry, however, from blanket amnesty.”

And yet, he insisted, “I strongly believe that if someone is willing to work and someone’s looking for a worker and can’t find anybody, we ought to facilitate the two hooking up. And so there are ways to make sure that people are rewarded for hard work without affecting those who have been patiently waiting in line for legal status.”

He was not finished. Mexico, Bush went on, “is our neighbor and we ought to have a neighborhood that is prosperous and peaceful.” He spoke of his strong regard for Vicente Fox, made reference to the Mexican president’s coming visit, and then he wrapped it up with a flourish that, for those accustomed to the harsh rhetoric of California’s immigration war, fairly flew off the transcript page:

“The long-term solution for immigration is for Mexico to be prosperous enough to grow a middle class where people will be able to find work at home. And I remind people all across our country, family values do not stop at the Rio Bravo. There are people in Mexico who have got children who are worried about where they are going to get their next meal from. And they are going to come to the United States, if they think they can make money here. That’s a simple fact. And they’re willing to walk across miles of desert to do work that some Americans won’t do. And we’ve got to respect that, it seems like to me, and treat those people with respect.”

Now, of course, there are those who will hear in such comments nothing more than a Republican politician trying to expand his party’s base. Others will argue that Bush is less interested in respecting Mexican workers than in providing a pipeline to carry cheap labor to American agriculture and industry. And there are the Washington beltway wags who believe he focuses on Mexico because other foreign policy questions are too complex for him--the littlest statesman model.

A more interesting possibility has been raised by California author Richard Rodriguez, who maintains that Bush’s stance toward Mexico reflects a fundamental difference in the way Texans and Californians view their place in the world. Californians, by Rodriguez’s thinking, see themselves in an east-west context, in terms of the “Manifest Destiny” that pushed the nation to the Pacific Coast. The internal compass of Texans, though, tends to point north-south. And Bush, Rodriguez said in an interview, might well be “the first American president who really does identify along this north-south line, connected from Canada all the way to the tip of Latin American, and he sees American destiny in those hemispheric terms.”

Whatever the reasons behind it--and in full recognition that political speech does not always correspond to political action--Bush’s language on the topic of Mexico nevertheless is remarkable in its own right:

And I remind people all across our country, family values do not stop at the Rio Bravo. . . .

And they’re willing to walk across miles of desert to do work that some Americans won’t do. . . .

And we’ve got to respect that, it seems like to me, and treat those people with respect.

An amazing turn in the conversation.