Bush’s Symbolism Falls Flat in Mexico

President Bush’s “viva Mexico” routine is wearing thin. Symbolism, rather than substance, is all that’s left of the once-hopeful relationship between the White House and Mexican President Vicente Fox.

Bush has been reduced to holding Cinco de Mayo fiestas at the White House and, now, possibly sending a Latino ambassador to Mexico City. Texas Railroad Commissioner Tony Garza, a Mexican American, reportedly may be nominated for the post.

This is not to take anything away from Garza, a Bush ally and popular Tejano pol. Garza is seen as a rising GOP star in Texas, where his job includes oversight of the state’s oil and gas industry. Of course, if nominated, Garza could be in for a grilling on how much oversight his office had over a Texas company called Enron.

But even assuming that Garza can maneuver through the political shoals of the Enron scandal to become Bush’s man in Mexico City, that’s no guarantee he’ll be able to help the president get the U.S.-Mexico relationship back on track. Hope of a new era in U.S.-Mexico relations faded fast after Sept. 11. Fox’s dream of an open border has given way to tighter border controls. And talk of development aid to poor regions of Mexico has been replaced with military aid to nations such as Pakistan.

Garza’s ethnicity may be a big deal to Latino activists who keep scorecards of government appointments, but being Mexican American isn’t enough in Mexico. The Bush people may have forgotten, but the Mexicans cared little for two former U.S. ambassadors--Julian Nava and John Gavin--despite their family ties to Mexico.

In fact, a cool reception is almost guaranteed if the new U.S. ambassador shows up with nada to offer Fox regarding the biggest issue on the U.S.-Mexico agenda: the continued illegal status of many Mexican workers in the United States.

Fox’s government has been pressing forward with unilateral steps to regularize the status of those workers, most notably issuing secure new identity cards to them through Mexican consulates in this country, so they will presumably be less exploitable in our underground economy.

So far the Bush administration has not even acknowledged this comparatively bold step. Apparently, the White House has put discussions of a Mexican labor migration agreement way down on the State Department’s “to do” list.

That’s not smart because Fox desperately needs some kind of migration deal to maintain his political influence with an increasingly assertive Mexican Congress, still controlled by the opposition parties that Fox defeated in Mexico’s presidential election in 2000.

The personal popularity that carried Fox into office is slipping. Mexican presidents serve one six-year term, and Fox’s successor is unlikely to be as cooperative with the U.S. as Fox has tried to be. Mexican political analysts warn that Fox could be reduced to lame-duck status by next year, when midterm elections are held in Mexico, unless he can rebound politically. And nothing would get the Mexican public’s attention like a migration deal with Washington.

The average Mexican--as opposed to Mexico City’s elites--sees Fox’s push for a migration deal with Bush as the key test of the Fox presidency, according to a former top Mexican official I spoke with recently. Fox will fail that test unless Bush offers him “more than nice speeches and handshakes.”

My source pointed to two recent setbacks for Latino immigrants in the U.S. that got lots of attention in Mexico but were virtually ignored by the White House: the Senate delay of Bush’s proposal to allow some Latino immigrants to legalize their status without leaving the U.S. and a Supreme Court decision giving employers the right to fire illegal immigrants who engage in union activities.

“Even a few words from Bush expressing concern about the negative impact the Supreme Court ruling might have on Mexican workers would have helped Fox,” the former official said. “But Fox got nothing.”

Nothing, that is, except possibly the shallow symbolism of a Latino ambassador.