Bush's Mexican Dream

President Bush offered a lot of stick and not much carrot in Monday's speech on illegal immigration. The big stick involves spy planes and detention centers, more cops on the chaparral and an armada of one-way buses headed back to the Mexican heartland. "Securing our border is essential to securing our homeland," he assured the audience at Tucson's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Bush presented the carrot, for the estimated 11 million people already living and working illegally in the U.S., as of the baby variety to avoid agitating immigration hardliners in his party: register immediately and you can work here for six years, and then return home to apply again.

This "temporary worker" proposal, one that Bush has been on record supporting for years, has drawn renewed heat from GOP activists, who don't buy Bush's assertion that it's not a general amnesty. But even if he does get the idea past a skeptical Congress, the real challenge may come in convincing the workers themselves that it's a good idea.

Bush is counting on the undocumented workers' desire for a more normalized status. Most illegal aliens aren't under a daily threat of deportation, but they and their families do suffer in the "shadows" that Bush referred to in his speech. Life as a day laborer may be moderately comfortable, but core of the American dream—social mobility—often eludes those who have no documentation.

One effect of the lack of a coherent immigration strategy during the past three decades has been a scattershot and seemingly unpredictable approach toward undocumented workers that has sown mistrust on all sides. Border watchdog groups like the Minutemen are pressing north and east into states like Virginia. Towns burdened with paying for services for undocumented workers are taking matters into their own hands with random crackdowns on immigrants where they work and where they live. In the northeast, at least, rumors ripple through immigrant communities about heads of families who were called in for supposedly routine review of citizenship applications, only to be detained for months before being deported back to Mexico. Regardless of how true or typical those stories are, they've had the effect of pushing an already wary community even further underground.

In Mexico as well, faith in America's legal process appears to be in short supply. On a recent trip to central Mexican state of Michoacan, I heard an endless stream of bureaucratic horror stories from people who were too old, too timid or too honest to cross illegally. They actually applied for a visa when they wanted to visit loved ones in the States, but came away feeling more pessimistic than ever about American officialdom. According to the State Department's Website, it now takes 113 days just to get an appointment to apply for a visa at the embassy in Mexico City. Processing takes another 6 weeks. But the real canker is the $100 non-refundable application fee, an amount equal to ten times the daily wage in rural Mexico. No one I spoke with who paid the fee was granted even a tourist visa, and all were left embittered, and a bit more impoverished, by their experience.