President Bush is set to travel to Mexico Feb. 16 for talks with Mr. Fox, and immigration will be among topics on the agenda. Analysts on both sides of the border say, however, that a guest-worker program is unlikely to be effective on a large scale. Guest-worker programs and illegal migrant amnesties usually just make migration more attractive, says Sidney Weintraub of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. An expert in US-Mexico relations, Mr. Weintraub says he supported a migrant amnesty in 1986 that included penalties against employers who continued to use undocumented workers. But the penalties were not seriously enforced, Weintraub says, and nothing suggests to him that the government would be more stringent now.
Mexican experts concur that guest- worker programs often fall short.
We've learned that one doesn't impede the other. The problem with the bracero program was that legal workers' accounts of earning possibilities in the US encouraged illegals to follow in their footsteps - and the US government was lax in sanctioning employers who hired the illegals. The US actually already has a small guest-worker program, which brings in about 40,000 mostly agricultural workers, but US officials, including Gramm, consider it inefficient and expensive to administer. The senator said his new proposal would be an improvement because it would apply first to workers already in the US and because it will be administered by both countries. The time for activating a new guest-worker program may be short, given the US economic slowdown.