Mexico wants whole immigration enchilada

MEXICO CITY – This is not your father’s Mexican government.

Historically, Uncle Sam’s negotiating stance toward Mexico could be summed up in an old Spanish phrase – todo para aca y nada para alla (all toward here, and nothing toward there). Having humiliated Mexico in the 19th century by seizing half its territory, the United States was reluctant to horse trade with what Washington saw as an inferior power. When they did sit at the table – haggling over labor, oil, or trade – the Americans called the shots by dangling the promise of foreign aid or offers to legitimize the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which gripped the Mexican presidency for 71 years.

Now Mexico has something the United States wants – immigrant laborers. And Mexico knows it.

As negotiators for the two countries try to pound out a historic immigration accord, it is Mexico that has the leverage – along with a democratically elected government that no longer has to look north for legitimacy. Having defeated the PRI in the Mexican presidential election one year ago this week, the charismatic Vicente Fox has set his sights on redefining U.S.-Mexican relations.

In an exclusive interview with a delegation from the Dallas Morning News, Fox said he believed that a strong and independent Mexico would only strengthen those relations. And he and his administration are ready to deal.

The Fox administration will happily satisfy American demands for tens of thousands of guest workers but, in turn, it wants the United States to acknowledge that the relationship between the two countries is a special one that warrants special treatment. Mexico would like no limit on the annual allotment of foreign visas granted to Mexicans, more humane working conditions for Mexican laborers, and a crackdown on those who would threaten or otherwise mistreat Mexican nationals in the United States.

That’s just for starters. Fox also wants some form of lawful status conferred on the estimated 4- to 5-million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States.

“Mexicans who work in the United States should be considered legal,” Fox said. “They shouldn’t have to hide in the shadows.”

Mexican officials are smart enough not to use the “A-word” – amnesty – which they must realize is a non-starter with most Americans who have been there and done that. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to more than 2 million illegal immigrants, and polls show Americans none too eager to make yet another wholesale exception to immigration law. So the Mexicans instead have taken to asking for “regularization.”

Recently in Phoenix to address the annual meeting of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda made it plain that unless Mexicans in the United States get legal protection, the United States can forget about getting its guest workers.

Castaneda told the journalists: “It’s the whole enchilada, or nothing.”

That hard line is a departure from what Fox said just a few months ago after separate meetings with President Bush and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. Amnesty – er, regularization – need not be a deal-breaker to working out a new guest worker plan with the United States, the Mexican president indicated. Since then, all the presidente’s men have gotten an earful of other views from labor unions, Democrats and Mexican-American organizations. As a result, Mexican negotiators may feel more secure in going after what they wanted all along – legal status for Mexicans in the United States.

This calls for a sales job and Fox, the former Coca-Cola executive, is revving up for the task. Later this month, he heads to the U.S. heartland – Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit – to try to convince Americans that they have more to gain than to fear from a new restructuring of an old relationship.

This is new. The old and proud Mexico ignored or condemned those who abandoned it in favor of greater opportunity on “the other side.” The new and more compassionate Mexico worries about its departed workers – these runaway children – and demands that they be protected from unscrupulous American employers, rifle-toting ranchers and ballot initiatives that would deny the undocumented education and health care. It offers dual nationality with the United States, and pushes the host country to grant Mexican nationals the same rights that Americans enjoy – to drive with licenses, to sue employers, to join unions and even to vote.

Make no mistake. What Mexico is after is more than “regularization.” It’s amnesty – the whole enchilada.