Mexicans See Plan for Migrants as a Good Start

Cesar Garcia, who was earning $11 per hour nailing roofs onto houses in Atlanta, returned to his family here on Christmas Eve, elated to see his wife and 5-year-old daughter for the first time since he made his illegal trek to the United States nearly four years ago.

On Wednesday, with the Christmas season over, the 29-year-old Garcia’s joy turned to confusion. News of President Bush’s proposal to recognize millions of undocumented workers in the United States reached his television screen, leading Garcia to curse his timing.

“If only Bush had made that speech a month ago, while I was still working up there, I surely would have been in line for a work visa,” Garcia said Thursday as he harvested chamomile bunches near the volcanic slopes of Mt. Popocatepetl, southeast of Mexico City. “By coming home, did I miss my chance?”

Such questions abound in Mexico, the country with the biggest stake in Bush’s immigration initiative. While welcoming it, migrants and officials from President Vicente Fox down wondered how many people would gain the right to live and work legally in the United States and how they would be chosen.

At this point, there are no sure answers. Bush’s plan would create a temporary work program for undocumented migrants now in the United States and people in other countries who have been offered jobs in America. But the idea has yet to be developed into a bill specifying numbers and procedures, and it is Congress that will ultimately hammer out the details.

If a Republican-sponsored bill from last year is any guide, only migrants who have lived and worked in the United States since Aug. 1 would be eligible for temporary work visas. Such a restriction might be a problem for hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexican migrants who, like Garcia, came home for a Christmas visit.

Garcia has no doubt that he will return to the United States. The tea harvest here pays just $12 a day. The question, he said, is whether to apply for a visa in Mexico under the new proposal or sneak back into the United States at the Arizona border, get his job back in Atlanta and apply there.

In either case, he would need backing from the roofing company that employed him. But which route would offer the better odds?

Resting his scythe on his shoulder, he pondered the question and wondered aloud: “If I try to jump the border again, what would I have to lose?”

Other Mexicans who came home for the holidays are already heading back north. Some say they are optimistic about the Bush plan and hope to become eligible for work visas. Others are returning to their U.S. jobs with little expectation that Bush can get a bill through Congress.

“Illegal migration is going to continue,” Alberto Rojas, 39, said at Mexico City’s northern bus terminal Thursday before heading to Tijuana. From there, he will try to return illegally to his factory job in Phoenix.

Mexico, with as many as 10 million workers sending home $14 billion a year from the United States, has a lot to gain from an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws. Since the two rancher-statesmen took office three years ago, Fox has been lobbying Bush to expand guest-worker programs and legalize the estimated 3.5 million to 4 million undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States.

Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said that Bush’s outline might not satisfy Mexico but called it a welcome start. He said Fox’s government, in negotiations with the Bush administration, would “continue working for, searching for, a complete program, a whole one, which covers all those who seek temporary work and those already in the United States.”

“We’re going for more. We’re going for more,” Fox told reporters Thursday.

In Juchitepec, a textile and farming town of 26,000 people, residents had plenty of suggestions for how Fox should lobby Bush when they meet Monday at an economic summit in Monterrey, Mexico.

“He should tell Bush to give the maximum number of work permits for our men,” said Gema Espinoza, whose husband waters a golf course in Maryland. “Our textile plants hire mainly women, but there’s not enough work for men on our farms.”

Mexican newspapers sold in Constitution Plaza, the town square, focused more on the Fox administration’s reservations than the Bush plan itself.

Still, many were excited by the news.

Among them was Alberto Rosas, 25, a policeman with an automatic rifle standing guard outside City Hall. Rosas said he planted pine trees in Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia and Pennsylvania for six months last year as one of 160,000 Mexicans with temporary U.S. work visas. He welcomed the program’s proposed expansion.

As he spoke, Antonio Vergara, the plaza’s news vendor, walked up to criticize the plan. “We want an unconditional amnesty for all our illegal workers up there so they can enjoy full human rights,” he said.

Like many Mexicans, he dismissed Bush’s plan as a longshot gesture aimed at wooing Latino voters to boost his reelection chances.

Vergara, who said he worked illegally for six years in half a dozen American states, led a visiting reporter and photographer on a tour, pointing out in nearly every block the homes of people who had at least one son or daughter living illegally in the United States.

At one home, Antonio Velazquez and his wife, Guillermina, answered the door. Seven of their nine children are working illegally in Florida, they said, and the last time they saw any of them was four years ago. They have never seen eight of their grandchildren, who were all born in the United States.

“My children are like birds. They left the nest and never came back,” said Velazquez, a 74-year-old farmer. If his children benefit from the Bush plan, he added, they could finally come home to visit, because they would no longer face steep smuggler’s fees for the return trip.

Mayor Ramiro Rendon, who has several relatives in Arizona, agreed that Bush’s plan could reunite many families divided by the border. But he criticized it for limiting legalized migrants to three-year work visas.

Rendon said migrants need longer-term security, and he offered something in return: Mexican mayors could play a role in selecting future migrants for work visas, vouching for those from their towns who are solid citizens and good workers. Mexicans currently holding U.S. work visas are vetted only by their employers and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.

“We are pleased by this offer from the president of the United States, and we are at his service,” the mayor said. “If we could work directly with American counties and states to make this program work, it would be magnificent.”