In 2001, when Jorge Castaneda was the foreign minister in the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox, he developed a plan that he hoped would encourage the United States to provide legal status for his countrymen living illegally in the United States.
If the United States would grant legal status and allow for other Mexicans to enter the country as temporary workers, Mexico would end its policy of laissez faire at the border. It would enforce the Mexican law that requires all persons to exit the country at designated ports of entry, with the requisite documentation for entering the neighboring country.
Two years later, when I wrote a story about the plan, I spoke with Castaneda's brother, Andres Rozental, a former deputy foreign minister of Mexico.
Rozental said the proposal offered a quid pro quo under which Mexico would win legal status for many of its countrymen and the United States would receive the benefits of a more orderly border.
The idea never got far. There was even disagreement as to whether Mexico presented it during the binational immigration talks that began in 2001 as both Fox and George W. Bush began their presidencies.
Part of the problem was that the idea was a non-starter in a country where freedom of movement is a constitutional guarantee and illegal emigration to the United States is an entrenched tradition.
For most Mexican politicians, it was radioactive. As Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, then with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me: "How can you deny someone a chance for the decent life you cannot provide them?"
In 2003 I asked Mexican Interior Secretary Santiago Creel about Castaneda's idea for a Mexican border patrol. He rejected it flatly.
"We are not going to do that", said Creel, during a press conference at the Mexican embassy in Washington.
Creel stood in front of a wall that carried a famous saying of former Mexican President Benito Juarez: "Respect for the rights of others is peace." The contradiction between the wisdom of Juarez and the declaration of Creel was striking.
When I visited the Mexican community of Sasabe, where smuggling is the economy and the grocery store is named "El Coyote", I asked a Mexican immigration official about those in the United States who are called illegal immigrants.
As he took small steps sideways to an imaginary borderline just south of the real border with Arizona, the official said, "The Constitution guarantees freedom of movement. So any Mexican can go right up to the line without breaking the law."
He finished his point with a shrug: "And once he enters the United States, he's out of our jurisdiction."
