The Key To Immigration Is Development Of Home Resources... In The Country Of Origin

Making American Money at Home in Mexico: Ample Jobs in Tourism Lure Workers to Cancun, Far From U.S. Border and Debate on Immigration

Perhaps we have it all wrong... We shouldn't develop a guest worker program, but we should convince Mexican, Dominican, El Salvadoran and other countries to allow US owenership of property and development of viable businesses... Then the folks attempting to cross our borders would, as illustrated in the article cited below, want to stay home. We could tear down our fences and generate profits as well.

CANCUN, Mexico -- There was a time when Jose Luis Luevano could envision making real money -- feeding-the-family, paying-the-rent money -- only in El Norte, or the United States.

Every nine months or so, he stuffed a backpack at his home in San Luis Potosi, a sooty industrial town at the northern rim of Mexico's high central plateau, and went north. He liked the cash he earned when he slipped illegally across the border. But he hated the journey. And he hated being away from his family more.

Then, six years ago, someone told him about Cancun. Real money could be found there, too, they said. American money without having to go to the United States.

He never went to El Norte again.

Luevano, 30, a taxi driver who also operates a small catering business here, is still a migrant, but a migrant of another sort. While President Bush met last week with his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, in this seaside resort, tens of thousands of Mexican migrants drawn here by the promise of a steady paycheck drove the cabs, served the tropical drinks and managed the front desks.

These workers are simultaneously dependent on the United States, for the tourists who make this place a huge economic engine, and independent from their richer northern neighbor, because they don't feel the need to leave their country to make a living.

"Why would I want to go to the U.S.? To die in the desert?" said Alejandro Corrato Orozco, a security guard with mutton-chop sideburns at the Grand Oasis Hotel, who spends his days pacifying drunken U.S. college students. "Mexico -- Cancun -- is a land of riches. I like these Americans, but I don't want to live in their country."