Perspectives on the Bush Administration's new immigrant guestworker proposal: the Mexican perspective.

• Author: Diaz, Mariana

The government of Mexico has generally welcomed President Bush's immigration proposal. As President Fox said in January of this year when he met with President Bush in Monterrey, Mexico, "it is a very important step in improving the relationship because the topic [of immigration] is a priority for both nations." (1) In this respect, Mexico values President Bush's initiative because it signified the importance Washington places on the bilateral relationship.

The immigration issue is in fact something both leaders had been working on long before they became heads of state. As President Fox said shortly after President Bush made his proposal, "[i]t is a program we've been working on since we were both presidents of our respective countries. We've been working on this since he was governor [of Texas] and I was governor [of Guanajuato], since he was president elect and I was president elect, and we've been working on it for the last three years. It has been a fundamental topic in bilateral relations." (2)

But President Fox also said that it is an initiative that has to be widely discussed and analyzed by the U.S. public and U.S. Congress. While the proposal recognizes the invaluable contributions Mexican immigrants make economically and socially to the United States, right now, it constitutes a first step in the right direction. As we all know, details are crucial; and, in these comments, I will outline a number of questions the proposal raises, which have also been raised by various Mexican government officials over the past few months. However, first I will summarize the historic pattern of Mexican immigration to the United States and the reasons for increase in the numbers.

Migration flows have evolved rapidly since the early 1970s. Since that time, Mexican immigration has become a much more complex phenomenon than many commentators realize. There are three principle factors that explain this evolution:

1. The first is an accelerated growth of Mexican migration beginning in the 1970s. Between the 1940s and 1970s, Mexico adopted an economic growth model that emphasized industrialization. This resulted in a significant decline in agriculture's contribution to Mexico's gross domestic product and, thus, displacement of Mexican agricultural workers. Moreover, Mexico's internal migration, from rural urban areas, exacerbated migration to the north. This milieu of economic transformation was marred by fiscal crises, which peaked in the 1980s, during...