Weekly Report - 13 January 2004

A week before he was due to arrive in Monterrey for the Summit of the Americas, US President George Bush Jr lifted the freeze imposed on the immigration issue after September 2001, unveiling a proposal that would turn illegal immigrants into legal temporary workers with a chance of opting for permanent residence. President Vicente Fox gave the scheme a tepid welcome, noting that it was `below Mexican expectations'. Many editorialists in the US interpreted it as an attempt to woo the Latino vote in the forthcoming US presidential elections.

Historian Lorenzo Meyer, of the Colegio de México, said that the initiative reminded him of the post-WWII braceros programme, under which more than 2m Mexicans entered the US as temporary agricultural workers. An enduring legacy of that scheme, he says, is the unsolved dispute over contributions docked from the braceros' paypackets that were never reimbursed.

The main components of the Bush `temporary worker' scheme are:

• Illegal immigrants already in the US or would-be immigrants abroad are offered the opportunity to apply for a three-year visa, renewable for an unspecified term or number of times. Those abroad pay nothing, but must show they have a job assured (the employer must prove that there are no takers among US nationals). Those in the US must pay a registration fee and prove that they are employed.
• Workers with temporary visas enjoy the same rights as their US peers. They will be free to move to and from their country of origin for the duration of the visa, and to bring over their dependents if they can prove ability to support them. Upon the expiry of their visas they must return home.
• Incentives will be offered to foreign workers to return to their home countries (such as entitlement to collect retirement pay based on the social security contributions in the US).
• The annual issue of green cards will be increased to enable the implementation of this scheme.

Caveat on intent
Pro-immigration critics within the US note that the Bush scheme is so far just a declaration of intent, not a draft bill to be submitted to congress (which must legislate on the introduction of many of its components). Its transformation into a bill — or proposed amendments to bills already introduced — would be seen as confirmation that this goes beyond an electioneering ploy. The only indication in this direction is that Senate majority leader William Frist personally told President Fox, when in Mexico last week, that the Republican legislators would support Bush's scheme.

It is worth recalling that in mid-2003 three Republican legislators (Jeff Flake, Jim Kolbe and John McCain) introduced a bill establishing a temporary-worker régime, which would allow illegal immigrants in the US to apply for a special new visa that would entitle them to obtain a green card, and would-be immigrants to apply for jobs advertised on the Internet.

Worrying details
A fear expressed by many illegal immigrants is that by registering for the new temporary visa they would be laying themselves open to deportation three years on, if the US authorities chose not to renew their permit. `The devil is in the details,' notes Mexico's former foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, who had sketched the outline of a similar scheme with US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and US Secretary of State Colin Powell back in September 2001, just before the attacks. Another one of those devilish details is the actual increase planned in the number of green cards to be issued annually.

Mexico is the country most interested in any scheme that may better the lot of illegal immigrants to the US: its nationals are reckoned to account for about 60% of all illegal immigrants, and their remittances have become a major source of hard-currency revenues (in January-November 2003 they surpassed US$12bn, which made them Mexico's second-largest inflow of hard currency, after oil).

One Mexican who praises the Bush scheme as `quite reasonable' is Sergio Sarmiento, a much-read columnist in Reforma, who reminded his readers that Mexico's immigration rules, much stricter than those of the US, have been unable to stanch the throughflow of Central Americans on their way to the US. After Mexico, two Central American countries are the main sources of illegal migration to the US: El Salvador, with an estimated 189,000 entrants in the 1990s, and Guatemala, with 144,000.