MEXICO CITY — An ambitious agreement pushed by President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox to legalize the status of illegal immigrants was doomed from the start, says a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
Jeffrey Davidow, who has written a controversial book spanning his stint in Mexico from 1998 to 2002, says the plan to legalize the status of millions of Mexican immigrants raised expectations to impossible levels.
"There was a good deal of euphoria," he said in an interview Monday, referring to the leaders' first meeting, in February 2001 in Mexico. "There was a natural inclination of the new presidents to not be as aware as they later would become of the limits of their power."
By mid-2002, the deal lay in shambles.
In his book, "The Bear and the Porcupine," Davidow portrays the United States as a clumsy bear treading on its neighbor's sense of sovereignty, and Mexico as a hypersensitive porcupine attuned to insults, real or imagined.
Davidow describes Fox as a well-meaning but ineffective president whose term has been marked by a series of missteps and unfulfilled expectations. Fox's election in 2000 ended the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, but his reform efforts have largely been blocked by the Mexican Congress.
"He was in a very difficult political situation. Maybe he's not the best politician in the world, but even if he were, I don't think he could have accomplished much more," Davidow said.
Whereas the Bush administration was vague on what an immigration deal might include, Fox pressed for a plan to "regularize" the status of millions of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. Temporary work permits also would have been increased and family visas made available, his government said.
"Fox made it known as early as August 2000, after he won the election but before he took office, that a sweeping immigration plan was his top priority," Davidow said. "Fox was pushing for a comprehensive deal, Bush was looking for a better way to do immigration. A full amnesty was never really on the table."
Bush's political consultants told him soon after his first meeting with Fox that his base of support in the U.S. Congress and among voters would never go along with a new immigration law that resembled amnesty for "lawbreakers" who had entered the country illegally.
