Bush’s Proposal for Immigration Reform Misses the Point

President Bush's sweeping immigration reform plan announced Wednesday to help legalize undocumented workers while tightening U.S. border controls missed the most important point -- that the flow of illegal immigrants will not stop unless we help narrow the development gap between the United States and Mexico.

Instead of wasting his time and our money on more Band-Aid efforts to fix the U.S. immigration quagmire, Bush should have proposed a push to revamp the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement with new provisions to aid Mexico's most neglected states and thus reduce the incentives for poverty-ridden Mexicans to leave their country.

Any immigration expert will tell you that most Mexican migrants would much rather live in their own country than leave. But as long as the per-capita income in the United States is $36,000 a year and that of Mexico $6,000, the up to 400,000 Mexicans who cross the border illegally every year will continue doing so, no matter how many U.S. agents are deployed at the border.

TRIPLED EXPORTS

To be sure, the 1994 U.S. free trade deal with Mexico and Canada was by most measures a success. It allowed Mexico to triple its exports to the United States and to increase its U.S. direct investments by nearly 15 times, from $1.3 billion in 1992 to $15 billion in 2001.

Despite the gloomy forecasts by critics that NAFTA would create a ''giant sucking sound'' of U.S. jobs moving to Mexico, the number of U.S. jobs actually grew significantly in the '90s.

But while NAFTA was great for Mexico as a whole, it has mostly benefited northern Mexican border states, which have the highest levels of education and are closest to the United States. Meanwhile, central and southern Mexico states continued to lag behind.

The solution, as American University's Center for North American Studies director Robert Pastor argues in this month's issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, may be to learn from the 15-country European Union experience and upgrade NAFTA into a ''North American Community'' in which the United States and Canada would provide aid to help Mexico catch up with its northern neighbors.

EUROPE'S LESSON

The lesson from the European Union is that the richest countries' most effective assistance was channeled into Europe's poorest countries' infrastructure and education and only on condition that the receiving nations provided matching funds and pursued sound economic policies, Pastor says. Washington should do the same with Mexico, he adds.

''Whether Bush's new immigration proposals are simply an election-year ploy or an effort to massage strained relations with Mexico, they will make illegal migration worse,'' Pastor told me in a telephone interview Wednesday. ``When you propose the legalization of up to 10 million people who are here illegally, you turn the red light of illegal immigration to green.''

''The only way to reduce illegal immigration is to make Mexico's economy grow faster than that of the United States,'' Pastor added.

Granted, you can't do that overnight. But if Mexico's economy were to grow at 6 percent a year for a decade -- much less than what China has grown over the past two decades -- and the U.S. economy continued to grow at 3 percent a year, the gap would close by 20 percent in this decade, Pastor estimates.

`NEW OPTIMISM'

''This alone would begin to shift perceptions in Mexico,'' he said. ``You would see the creation of jobs in Mexico and a new optimism that might even lead some Mexicans to want to return to Mexico.''

Indeed, the European Union approach has worked. Spain and Ireland tripled their per-capita incomes over the past two decades after they joined the European Union and their richest neighbors began giving them money to build roads, bridges and schools, conditioned on their sound economic behavior.

Why shouldn't Washington begin thinking about a similar approach, especially when it needs Mexico more than ever as a partner to keep terrorists away from U.S. borders, reduce the U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil, increase U.S. exports and reduce illegal migration?

Rather than focusing U.S. energies on immigration reforms, Bush should launch NAFTA's Phase 2 to start reducing North America's income gap. And if he doesn't, Democratic presidential hopefuls should make the proposal as soon as possible.