A Tex-Mex exchange: making it easier for cross-cultural exchanges between U.S. and Mexican students is the goal of some legislators.

• Author: Boulard, Gary

Texas Senator Judith Zaffirini is not alarmed by the large number of Mexican residents who every day cross the World Trade Bridge connecting Laredo, Texas, with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

In fact, if those residents are students, she would like to see more of them.

"We are increasingly living in an international arena today, and these kinds of exchanges are good for the students of both countries because it gives them the opportunity to learn about one another's culture and to network," Zaffirini says.

Every year hosts a reception at the Capitol honoring the roughly 1,800 students from Mexico who study at the University of Texas.

Although California, Arizona and New Mexico also share the border with Mexico, the border between Texas and Mexico is the longest, which partly explains why two- and four-year schools in Texas have more Mexican students, 4,978 in 2003, than any other state.

By contrast, according to the Institute of International Education (ITE), California universities and colleges were attended by 1,292 students from Mexico in 2003, followed by Arizona at 1,280 and New Mexico, with only 225 students.

That Mexican students, unlike most of their counterparts from other foreign countries, often cross the border daily and endure hardships to attend U.S. schools should not come as a surprise, says Alvaro Roma, the executive director of international programs with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities in San Antonio.

"Mexican students put a high value on education and therefore are amazingly persistent in spite of the odds against them," says Roma.

Some lawmakers are looking for ways to make it easier both for students coming to the United States as well as those who travel from north of the border to study in Mexico (some 8,078 for the 2002-2003 school year).

"You have to build partnerships," says former Texas Representative Tim Von Dohlan, who in 1991 sponsored legislation making it easier for Mexican graduate students to attend graduate schools in Texas.

"At that time, Mexico was lacking in programs at the graduate level," says Von Dohlan, "so we passed legislation saying that such students could come to Texas and be treated as a resident of our state with the agreement that when they went back to Mexico they would use the skills they had acquired here to help build the infrastructure that was needed in their country."

California lawmakers in 2001 passed a bill allowing for the exchange of up to 1,000 Mexican students and...