http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02126.html

In Mexico, Migration Issue Gets No Traction
Ahead of July Vote, Presidential Candidates Find Little to Gain From Highly Charged Debate in U.S.

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 15, 2006; A14


HUEJUTLA, Mexico -- The illegal immigration debate draws millions of protesters to the streets of U.S. cities. It touches off podium-pounding on Capitol Hill and passions among talking heads.

But the same debate here in Mexico, the country of origin of most illegal immigrants in the United States, is far from a blockbuster issue in this year's presidential contest. Even though developments in the United States have forced candidates to discuss migration more often in the past two months than in the early stages of the race, none of the three major contenders has made the issue a central tenet of his campaign.

Their calculus is simple, according to political analysts and advisers to the candidates: They don't think it will help them win the July 2 election.

"Foreign policy doesn't give you any votes in Mexico," Jorge Montaño, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations, said in an interview. "The candidates have been extremely practical."

Beyond the political calculation, the candidates' strategies are grounded in fundamentals, including the reality that a Mexican president has no control over U.S. immigration law, and in hard numbers. Expectations that huge numbers of Mexicans living in the United States would register to vote went unmet. After 1 million absentee ballots were printed, only 40,800 of an estimated 4 million eligible Mexicans living in the United States registered.

Recent political history also plays into the calculation, illustrating the risks candidates face by emphasizing migration. After his victory in 2000, President Vicente Fox staked much of his political capital on hopes of reaching an immigration accord with the United States. Those hopes disintegrated when the United States tightened its border policy following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leaving the perception that Fox had failed in one of his most important missions.

All three leading contenders in this year's race, Felipe Calderón of Fox's National Action Party, or PAN; Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD; and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, have said they want an immigration accord with the United States. But none has guaranteed they will deliver. On the stump they tend to race past any mention of an accord and on to pledges that they will stem migration by improving the economy.

"I would rather see a Huastecan working in a packing house in Huejutla than in a packing house in California," Calderón said during a recent campaign stop in Huejutla, a mountain town in eastern Mexico, 120 miles northeast of Mexico City, where indigenous Huastecan women placed a mound of flower petals on his head.

Calderón, who has spoken against building more fences along the U.S.-Mexico border, is proposing that Mexico solicit aid funds from the United States and Canada, another major destination of Mexican workers, for development programs in impoverished areas of Mexico that send the most illegal migrants abroad.

Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican consul general in New York who is Calderón's lead foreign policy adviser, said he expects candidates to address migration more often in the final weeks of the campaign. But he believes the discussion has to be presented through the prism of the economy of Mexico, where, the World Bank has estimated, half the population lives in poverty.

"The immigration issue, per se, does not weigh significantly in the campaign," Sarukhan said in an interview. "At the end of the day, the debate is about job creation."

López Obrador, who is tied with or slightly ahead of Calderón in new opinion polls, is taking a similar tack. In a televised presidential debate last week, López Obrador said Mexico needed to address the root causes of illegal immigration by providing more jobs, and he promised not to insert Mexico into the "internal lives of other countries and other governments."

"If we make things good in Mexico, if we clean our house, if there is progress in our country, if there is justice, if there is security, if there is political and social stability, they will respect us on the outside," he said.

López Obrador asserts that Mexico must convince the United States that illegal migration will not be slowed by building more fences and "militarizing the border," a reference to President Bush's decision to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops to support the U.S. Border Patrol. But the main thrust of his campaign has been trained on domestic issues, primarily promises to help poor voters, who form his political base, to lower their gas and electricity bills.

Migration "is a very important issue, but it will not define the Mexican elections," José María Pérez Gay, a former Mexican ambassador to Portugal, who is López Obrador's chief foreign policy adviser, said in an interview.

The migration question is particularly ticklish for Calderón. He has positioned himself as a candidate who will continue policies instituted by Fox, whose historic victory ended 70 years of PRI rule, an era marked by corruption and rigged elections. But he also faces the fact that the number of Mexicans living illegally in the United States has surged during Fox's six-year term to a record 6.2 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

By linking his political identity to Fox, Calderón has given the other candidates an opening to indirectly slam his candidacy by criticizing Fox during flashpoints in the U.S. immigration debate. López Obrador and Madrazo, who is a distant third in most opinion polls, went on the attack last month after Fox applauded a U.S. Senate vote that preserved proposals to create a guest-worker program and to develop a process for migrants living illegally in the United States to gain legal status.

López Obrador accused Fox, who is prohibited by Mexican law from campaigning for his party's candidate, of acting as Calderón's unofficial campaign manager and of being a puppet of the United States. Madrazo, who has pledged to slow migration by creating 9 million jobs in six years, accused Fox of "losing the battle" with the U.S. Congress.

"It's a deceit," Roberta Lajous, a former Mexican ambassador who advises Madrazo on foreign policy, said of Fox's reaction to the Senate vote. "He's acting as if there was a result. Nothing is final."

The uncertainty about the outcome in Congress is creating complications for the candidates here as they try to formulate their stances on migration issues, Pérez Gay said, and it is one of the main reasons migration has not taken a larger role in the campaign.

What is clear, Pérez Gay and the other candidates' campaign advisers say, is that millions of Mexican migrants, legal and illegal, will be in the United States for years to come.

López Obrador has proposed converting all of Mexico's consulates in the United States into offices tasked with protecting Mexican migrants from discrimination. During the presidential debate, which had a pre-formatted question about migration, he described his proposals for the consulates using a Spanish phrase that can mean "branches of the Mexican attorney general's office." Pérez Gay later said that the candidate's wording has been misinterpreted and that consular staff would act in a defense capacity, rather than attempt to be prosecutors.

Nonetheless, Calderón pounced on the remark, using it to further his contention that López Obrador is "dangerous" and would damage Mexico's relations with other countries.

"Having a dignified relationship with the United States does not necessarily imply having a confrontational relationship," Calderón said during a speech to a group of migrant leaders on June 7, the day after the presidential debate. "If we sum up the immigration theme, and many other themes, as themes of controversy and hate between the people of the United States and the people of Mexico, we'll be making a mistake and closing doors."

But by the next day, migration had slipped into the background again, and the candidates had moved on to other things.