Mexican Expatriates Want Ability to Vote, Seek Office

Decades after they left for the United States, 60 expatriates returned home this week to lobby for the ability to vote and run in Mexican elections.

The delegation of migrants came from California, Illinois, Washington state and New York to reignite interest in an issue that has sputtered for years. Its main goal: persuading the government to register between 10 million and 20 million Mexicans expatriates and create polling places for them in the United States and other countries.

“We have been denied rights that are clearly in the constitution,” said Antonio Moreno, vice president of the immigrant group Michoacan Federation of California.

“We are contributing to the economy in Mexico, but we have no rights,” said Moreno, who left Mexico 30 years and now lives in Huntington Park. “Now we want to vote, we want our own representatives, and we want them to come from our own ranks.”

Mexicans abroad send $8.5 billion a year home to family members and pump money into national tourism and real estate, according to the delegation here this week on a lobbying mission dubbed Migrantour.

All of Mexico’s major political parties acknowledge expatriates’ right to vote here. But an effort to clarify the laws on the matter died in Mexico’s Senate in 1998. More pragmatically, no party has had the political stamina to create an international voting system expansive enough to process the votes.

Many countries allow absentee voting by citizens abroad. But no other country has so many millions of expatriates who want to vote in absentia in national elections.

A 1998 report concluded that Mexico’s electoral institute could handle the counting of expatriates’ votes. But setting up an international polling system could take months, if not years. That delay would spoil Migrantour’s bid to secure the vote in 2003 legislative elections, said Ramon Leon Morales, a legislator from the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, who backs the Migrantour efforts.

On Tuesday, Leon explained the plight of the migrants to the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico’s lower house of Congress. A dozen members of the expatriate delegation sat in the audience, chanting, “Si se puede!” or “Yes, it can be done!”

Some opposition figures believe that efforts to extend the vote to expatriates were quashed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated Mexico for seven decades.

In 2000, Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, took over the presidency after a campaign that embraced migrants and promised them the vote. But no legislative action has yet been taken.

Jorge Mujica, a Chicago-based activist who organized Migrantour, said the timing is right for the voting campaign. “Mexico’s perception of [migrants] has changed. We were seen as people who picked fruit in fields and hid from la migra [immigration authorities]. Now every family in Mexico has someone in the United States,” he said. “It is time for us to reclaim our rights.”

Fox’s election, a dual nationality program approved in 1998, and the formation of a migrants lobbying coalition in mid-2001 in the United States set the stage for the trip to Mexico City.

But even before arriving, the group split into two. One faction proposed that migrants be named to legislative slates selected on party lines. The other faction, represented by the Migrantour group, proposes direct representation: Members want the Mexican legislature to add 10 senators and 40 lower-house legislators, likely chosen from the ranks of migrants, to represent Mexicans abroad. There are currently 128 senators and 500 legislators.

At least three U.S. residents, including one American citizen, have already tried to run for office in Mexico. Yolo County resident Andres Bermudez ran last July for mayor of the city of Jerez in Zacatecas state, about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City, but his victory was overturned because he had not lived in the city for one year before the election.

Many legislators here doubt that voting rights could be ensured quickly, perhaps not until presidential elections in 2006. They continue to debate whether migrants should be able to vote in congressional elections or presidential elections or both. And they are calculating how Mexico could pay for conducting elections abroad.

Irma Pineyro, a PRI legislator who heads the lower house committee on population, borders and migration, said her party does not consider expatriates’ voting rights a priority.

“I see more pressing issues, including the number of undocumented immigrants [in the U.S.], their labor rights and their medical coverage,” Pineyro said.

But the migrants hold out hope for immediate action.

“We are not asking for anything. We are demanding it,” said Felipe Aguirre, an official for the California-based affiliate of the PRD, who lives in Maywood. “We send money here, and we receive nothing in return.”