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 News from Around the Americas | June 2005 
Strategy Sought For Migrant Plan
 Alejandro Torres - El Universal
| | Last year, more than 300 migrants died while crossing rivers and deserts to reach the United States. |
Newport, Rhode Island - U.S. and Mexican lawmakers met here this weekend to discuss strategies to reach a pact that would define the status of millions of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States.
Legislators from the two countries met as part of a bilateral discussion group. The nations have been holding such meetings such 1960.
According to U.S. senators, President George W. Bush is ready to push immigration reform in the coming months. Bush unveiled a proposal last year, but it was pushed to the sidelines during the U.S. presidential elections.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is promoting a plan, backed by Bush, that would give Mexican workers legal visas allowing them to visit their families back home and return, as long as they have a job in the United States. Currently, many migrants spend years abroad without seeing their families, since crossing the border illegally is a dangerous and expensive affair.
Cornyn also trumpeted the creation of a system to withhold part of migrants' pay to finance infrastructure projects back home, as a way of boosting local economies and slowing down the migration flow north.
His plan, which he authored two years ago, does not include an "amnesty" for workers already in the United States. If passed, these workers would have to return to Mexico and apply for a temporary visa from there to work in the United States legally.
"It is easier to politically sell a program … in which people know that the workers are coming legally and then will return home afterwards," Cornyn said, adding that U.S. public opinion would not look favorably on "rewarding" migrants who arrived illegally.
While Sen. Jim Kolbe, R-Arizona, said the migration dilemma was more difficult today with increased terrorism and security concerns in the United States, Cornyn said, "It is very clear to us that there are no Mexican terrorists."
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Dep. Alberto Aguilar, of Sinaloa, agreed it was important not to unfairly demonize Mexican migrants.
"They see monsters and ghosts where there really are none," he said.
A competing bill, authored by Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona and Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, would allow migrants already in the United States to stay for three years if they paid a US2,000 fine, take English and civics courses, and undergo medical and background checks. This visa would be renewable.
U.S. lawmakers also expressed concern about the rising tide of drug-related violence on the nations' common border, while the Mexican delegation called on the United States to do more to bring down its own drug ringleaders. |
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