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 Editorials | Opinions | July 2007 
A Way Out of the Immigration Mess
 Mike Krauss - Wall Street Journeal
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From 1999 through 2005 I was a senior executive of a North American railroad based in Mexico City, responsible chiefly for intermodal traffic between locations in Mexico, the United States and Canada. For some years prior to that, and until only recently, I lived in a still predominantly rural area outside Mexico City, traveled widely in the country and worked often on the border. I have had both professional and personal contact with illegal immigration into the U.S.
Railroads that come out of Mexico must deal routinely with the "sleepers," as those who try to hitch a ride on the northbound trains are called. And in the small town outside of Mexico City where I lived, I knew any number of people who had tried and failed or tried and succeeded to make the more common journey on foot across the border which, I observed first-hand, is porous.
In order to resolve the crisis of illegal immigration into the U.S., it is important to understand who these people are and what they want. Overwhelmingly, they are young and healthy. It is not a journey for the old or frail. They are not all poor or uneducated. Many educated young Mexicans have no work. For every entry-level and mid-level managerial position my company advertised there were hundreds of qualified applicants. What drives them to make an always arduous, often perilous and sometimes fatal journey is the search for opportunity and more specifically, work.
The other thing that must be understood is that there is presently no effective process in place to lawfully manage the numbers of Mexicans and, to a lesser extent, other Hispanics seeking to live or work in the U.S. Through inaction and inattention Congress has manufactured a crisis.
The legal process is to stand for hours, often more than once, in a line outside the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. It's the kind of line I recall from my youth outside the local movie theater when a new Walt Disney movie opened. It seems to go on forever, with people waiting in the cold or rain or heat to bring a raft of papers and documents before an INS officer and take their best shot. By all accounts, it is not a pleasant experience.
No one may accompany the supplicant, so it is all hearsay, but what a careful listener will hear is that the officer does not really want you in the U.S. Basically, the applicant is required to prove to the officer that he or she has sufficient motives to return to Mexico. The result is that employed professionals or the well-to-do get visas for business trips, family vacations or shopping excursions. The rest - the vast majority - don't bother to try.
The story of one young neighbor of mine in Mexico is instructive and not atypical. Jorge, let's call him, was an intelligent and outgoing seventeen year old. We hired him to do some odd jobs at the house and over time became close to his family - other members had also worked for us. He got a degree in mathematics from the local university and hoped to teach. But there were no positions.
Teachers do not retire in Mexico: They can't afford to give up the job. All that was available was part-time work grading papers and otherwise taking the load off senior teachers. It was low paying even by Mexican standards. The U.S., however, has a real need for mathematics teachers, especially those who speak Spanish and English, as he does.
Jorge went through the legal process. He set up a bank account, which he, like many youths from the town, had never had before. His father pulled together his income records to demonstrate the family's means and went to considerable trouble to put a piece of land in his son's name. It was all to no avail.
His application was denied because, said the INS officer, his English was so very good that he had obviously been illegally to the States to learn it. He tried to explain that he had acquired his excellent, American English in an intensive language course: four hours a night, almost every Friday night of the year for five years, playing cards with American businessmen.
Yeah, right. Denied. Jorge took the other route to the United States.
Jorge had one other thing in common with most Mexican immigrants, apart from the "get-up-and-go" that Americans used to admire. Legal or otherwise, they are focused. They are not coming to wander aimlessly about. They are headed for a specific town or city where some family member or friend from their village is now or has been, and where they will be received by an extended family that provides initial shelter and will show them the ropes. Think of it as a combination social service and employment agency, provided tax free.
The point is, the overwhelming majority of these people come here looking for work. And it is clear the U.S. economy has a place for them. In several industries it has a critical need: meat packing and food processing, agriculture, hotel and restaurant services or bilingual mathematics instruction, for example.
What can be done? In the short term, first the security of the border with Mexico must be guaranteed to the satisfaction of anxious citizens, the overwhelming majority of whom believe, correctly, that it is not now sufficiently secured - although it strikes me that a garrisoned wall is unnecessary and offensive.
Second, we need to reform the legal process and direct the flow through a series of modern-day Ellis Islands, preferably in the interior of Mexico, fully staffed and funded to serve as welcome centers that will identify the newcomers, find out where they are headed, and try to match them up with legal employers in the U.S. In the new process a determination can be made if these are temporary workers or people who want to become Americans. They can then be monitored and assisted appropriately. When these two steps are accomplished, it will then be possible to revisit the legalization process for those who are already established in the country.
Of course, as I think it over, perhaps these proposed processing centers ought not be called "welcome centers." We wouldn't want to give the wrong impression. How about, Immigration Identification, Security and Control Centers? That ought to push all the right buttons on the talk-radio dial.
But for the long term, only raising the living standards of the Mexican people will staunch the flow. The U.S. and Canada together, but chiefly the U.S., need to invest in Mexico on the scale of a Marshall Plan, or as West Germany invested in East Germany at the reunification, and for the same reason. Huge disparities in the living standards of societies living in close proximity inevitably invite migration to the more prosperous society. The wider the gap, the greater the flow.
This investment in Mexico will have two other benefits for the U.S. Like the Marshall Plan, it can be structured to create opportunities for American businesses and expand markets for U.S. goods and services. And it will give the Mexican government an incentive to fix a policy that effectively exports its unemployment to the U.S.
What are the chances? It is difficult to say, but I am not voting for anybody for president, U.S. Senate or Congress in the 2008 elections who does not advance some kind of similar plan.
Mr. Krauss, a writer, was formerly an executive for a railroad based in Mexico City. |
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