By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

TZINTZUNTZAN, Mexico -- This town knows immigration patterns the way fishermen know the ocean. People's livelihoods, their new houses, food and clothes
for their children, all depend on them. This winter, what people here noticed was how many Mexicans illegally in the United States chose to stay there rather than
returning for Christmas with their families.

"Look around. There are not many here this year. It's too dangerous to cross," said Guadalupe Rendon, a shopkeeper whose son did not come home from a roofing
job in Manassas, even though he has a wife and two small children in Tzintzuntzan.

Tzintzuntzan (pronounced Tseen-TSOON-tsahn), an Indian name that means "place of hummingbirds," is a lakeside town of 3,000 in the hills 150 miles west of
Mexico City -- and more than 650 miles south of the U.S. border. More than most places, it demonstrates how immigration has hollowed out a large part of
Mexico's core. For every person here, another has left. Conspicuously few young men wander Tzintzuntzan's narrow streets. Many have crossed deserts, crawled
through sewerage pipes and dodged gun-toting vigilantes to find work in America.

As President Bush comes to Mexico to meet with President Vicente Fox today, millions of illegal workers in the United States like those from Tzintzuntzan rank at
the top of the agenda, which will also include drug smuggling and free trade. Mexico views immigration as the most important issue to be discussed. After their
meeting today, Fox and Bush are expected to announce the formation of a cabinet-level "immigration group" aimed at working out new solutions. The feeling here is
that the United States more than at any time in decades is ready to negotiate a better deal for its undocumented babysitters, construction workers, gardeners, office
cleaners and fishermen.

Illegal immigration has been a hot issue for years in the United States, which hosts an estimated 5 million undocumented workers, more than half of whom are from
Mexico. The problem often has been discussed with shrillness and finger-pointing as critics spoke of threats to the sovereignty of national borders, undermined wages
and jobs robbed from U.S. workers. Those worries have not disappeared. But as American prosperity soared, the value of these workers seemed more evident. As
a result, the construction, service and agricultural industries are lobbying Congress for a way to get more of these people into the United States legally.

Now, there are two new presidents with new ideas. Bush, who saw the issue up close as governor of Texas, where 30 percent of the population is Hispanic, has said
immigration should be viewed as an opportunity. Fox, who took office Dec. 1, has launched a crusade to get more respect for undocumented Mexican workers in
the United States. He has described them as "heroes" and stood at highway checkpoints along the border for several days in December shaking migrants' hands as
they returned home for Christmas. Eventually, he says, the border should allow free passage in both directions.

"The border is already open, to products, merchandise, services, capital," he said yesterday during an online discussion on washingtonpost.com. "We must have a
long-term vision, coherent with this situation, by constructing step by step the possibility in the future to open the borders to the free flow of people."

Many Mexican officials want a halt to the construction of border walls and barbed-wire fences between the two countries. Tightened U.S. security at the border has
been blamed for nearly 400 deaths in the last year as Mexicans try more dangerous routes, often drowning or dying of dehydration in the desert. There is also talk in
both countries of a new amnesty program to give legal status to some long-established, tax-paying Mexican workers who live in a shadowy world -- officially
invisible, ripe for abuse by employers, afraid to report crime or get care from a doctor.

Prominent Democrats and Republicans in Congress are calling for a guest worker program that would give more Mexicans a limited time to legally work at certain
jobs in the United States. Some of these proposals would affect more than a quarter-million Mexicans.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, is leading a group of 12 members of Congress here Monday, the latest in a parade of American
officials meeting with Fox. But Reyes, who spent 26 years in the Border Patrol, said "new thinking" on immigration could evaporate if unemployment rises in the
United States and that the time is ripe for a "comprehensive long-term strategy."

"No one wants a border that is out of control, where there are no designated points of entry, where we don't know who is coming in," said Reyes. At the same time,
he said, it makes sense to acknowledge that people "are crossing because they are hungry or unemployed. These people are not on America's most-wanted list."

Since the end of World War II, the United States has had a "half open-door policy" to Mexican immigrants, said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, a member of a panel
of Mexican and American scholars convened by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to study ways to recast America's approach to illegal Mexican
immigrants. "It is now time for U.S. policy to be updated, to catch up with reality," Fernandez said.

Greater prosperity in Mexico is seen as the only long-term solution. There is a new discussion, led by Fox, to try to get the United States and Canada to help create
more jobs in Mexico. Fox says it is Mexico's primary responsibility to raise its own standard of living. But he also says his neighbors to the north have a stake in
lending a hand, much as the European Union has done, with richer nations providing development funds for poorer ones.

Remigio Morales, who is preparing to leave Tzintzuntzan for his fourth illegal trip to the North, says the crossing is becoming progressively more difficult as the years
go by, leading people to stay longer each time.

"It's so much harder now to get into the United States, but what can I do here?" said Morales, 28, who has worked most of the past 10 years in Tacoma, Wash. "I
have to go."

It is clear in towns like this that without new decent-paying jobs people like Morales will continue to head north. "I would love to stay. I didn't want to go at all when
I first left. I was 17. But there was -- and is -- nothing for me here," he said.

As he talked, on a walk through town past roadside artisans making straw baskets and pottery, Morales spoke above the dance music rising out of the village's sole
wedding hall. The groom, Morales said, had just returned to marry and would be leaving again for Tacoma.

Immigration usually follows the easiest path, with friends following cousins following brothers to beachheads in the north. And Tzintzuntzan has created a clone in the
Tacoma area, where many of the estimated 3,000 people who have emigrated from here are now working.

Robert V. Kemper, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who has studied migration and the demographic patterns of this town since 1969, said
that until the mid-1980s, many people went to Mexico City for jobs. But then, a devastating earthquake damaged much of the capital at the same time that tough
economic times descended on the country and the path up north was established, worn more each year.

Morales first went to the United States in 1990; nine of his brothers and sisters work there, too. He said his first crossing was easy: a four-hour walk through a
remote area near Tijuana and $300 to a "coyote," the guide who brings illegals across.

His second crossing in 1994 was twice as expensive but required only a walk through the waters off San Diego. But by 1998 the border had changed completely: He
was arrested three times before making it, once after three nights of walking in the Arizona desert.

"America does everything it can to keep me out, but when I get in, Americans are so nice," said Morales, who has tried hard to learn English and educate himself.
"Even an immigration officer, when I was working on his father's patio, said to me, 'My job is only to stop you from getting in. Once you are here, you are my friend.'
"

Morales said that no amount of fences or patrol agents will keep ambitious Mexicans from trying to go north to feed their families. In fact, doubling the number of
U.S. agents to 8,800 along the 2,100-mile border has not stopped an estimated 300,000 Mexicans a year from crossing, although it has cost American taxpayers
billions, yielded 1.5 million annual arrests and led to a dramatic rise in Mexican deaths.

The main difference the tougher border has made, Morales said, is that he has to try more times before he succeeds.

                                               © 2001