Mexican leftist gets a boost from Bush

President Bush's let's-get-tough immigration speech earlier this week will have an unintended effect in Mexico -- revitalizing the ailing campaign of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor who vows to change his country's pro-business policies, had been plummeting in the polls in recent weeks. But Bush's speech on Monday, aimed at wooing his restless conservative base and averting a Republican debacle in November's congressional elections, may give Lopez Obrador's campaign a second wind.
To most Americans, and to The Miami Herald's editorial board, Bush's speech struck the right middle ground between English-only xenophobes demanding the expulsion of up to 12 million undocumented immigrants and advocates of a blanket amnesty.
But to Mexicans across the political spectrum, Bush's speech focused too much on border enforcement and too little on proposals for a guest-worker program and other ways of finding effective long-term solutions to the problem.
Guest worker program
Indeed, Bush devoted 10 paragraphs of his speech to announce his plan to secure the U.S. border -- including the deployment of up to 6,000 members of the National Guard along the border and the expansion of the Border Patrol by the same number of agents -- and only two paragraphs to his proposal for a temporary guest worker program.
In addition, the tone of Bush's speech was heavily influenced by Hispanic-phobic anti-immigration advocates who go ballistic when somebody fails to use the term "illegals" to refer to hard-working undocumented immigrants who take low-paying jobs offered by U.S. employers. Bush, who as recently as a Jan. 7, 2004, speech on immigration had used the term "undocumented workers," has now switched to "illegal immigrants."
"It was a slap in the face to Mexico," Rafael Fernandez de Castro, head of the foreign affairs department of Mexico's Autonomous Technological Institute, said, referring to Bush's speech. "Mexico has been insisting for several years that there is a shared responsibility, and that there should be a coordinated solution. This is a unilateral measure that won't solve anything."
The conventional wisdom in Mexico, and among many U.S. immigration experts, is that Bush's decision to deploy the National Guard is nothing but a feel-good measure aimed at placating anti-immigration groups. It will do little to slow the migration flow as long as the per capita income of Americans remains more than four times higher than that of Mexicans and U.S. employers -- and consumers -- continue to benefit from cheap labor, they say.
Since 1990, the U.S. government has increased the Border Patrol from 3,733 to 12,000 agents, yet the flow of undocumented migrants has doubled, according to studies by Princeton University professor Douglas S. Massey.
The biggest impact of increasing the number of Border Patrol agents has been "that once people are here, they no longer go home, because of the cost and the risks involved," Massey told me Wednesday.
Godsend
Reached by telephone on the campaign trail earlier this week, former Mexican Foreign Minister Manuel Camacho Solis, now a top aide to Lopez Obrador, agreed that Bush's speech may be a godsend for his candidate.
"This will take a toll on (President Vicente) Fox and on the (ruling party) PAN candidate, who had been saying all along that they would get a migration deal with Washington," Camacho told me. "All we're seeing now is troops along the border, which is an image of aggression, rather than one of cooperation. It will surely help benefit the opposition, i.e., Lopez Obrador."
My conclusion: If Bush's get-tough speech was necessary to get the Senate's approval of a temporary guest worker program and a path to legalization for undocumented migrants, which the Mexican government could sell at home as a diplomatic victory, good for him.
But if it becomes clear that the full Congress will not approve a bill that includes some measures to legalize the status of millions of undocumented workers, it will unintentionally help elect the first leftist president in Mexico's recent history.
Ironically, Bush's speech on Monday will deserve part of the credit -- or blame -- for that.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.