Immigration's lost voices

Mexico City — THE COLLAPSE of the bipartisan immigration deal in the Senate last week sends a terrible message. As flawed as some considered the bill to be, it was certainly an improvement over the status quo for some very interested parties: the roughly 12 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. and the roughly 500,000 a year who will continue to go north for at least the next 10 years.

Their point of view -- which is not the same as that of Latino community leaders in the United States or of business, labor or the Catholic Church -- has not been as present in the debate as one could hope. Why? In part because it's unclear who is supposed to speak for them. Ideally it would be the governments of their countries -- Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic -- but for mystifying reasons, those countries seem to prefer silence to advocacy.

The Senate package was a sum of trade-offs. Some were new: border security and "triggers" (in which parts of the deal would only begin once the border was "secured") in exchange for the equivalent of amnesty, a path to citizenship for some in exchange for no path for others, a point system for future immigration in exchange for a significant increase in overall green card numbers.

Other parts of the deal were essentially the same as those under discussion since 2001, when I was Mexico's foreign minister. At that time, I gave a speech using the phrase "the whole enchilada." That meant essentially that there could be no conceivable immigration agreement between Mexico and the U.S., and no conceivable immigration reform within the U.S., that did not address two fundamental issues. The first was, of course, the A-question (involving amnesty for the then-9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States). The second was the "TWP question" (for Temporary Worker Program): how to adapt legality to reality, instead of the other way around, and ensure that legal entries going forward would be more numerous than illegal ones.

With time (and in order to placate the right wing), border enforcement became part of the sum of trade-offs -- although without altering the previous, essential parameters: No A-word without TWP; no TWP without the A-word (although it could be as fig-leaved as anyone wanted). Many people at the time argued that asking for both was asking too much, either because they did not realize that one without the other was impossible or, disingenuously, because they were hoping to shoot down the whole deal.