By SAM DILLON
TIJUANA, Mexico
-- It is the year 2000. Millions of Mexican immigrants line up outside
polling places,
not only in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and other major locations in the United
States where
Mexicans have settled but in hundreds of towns across the country, preparing
to vote
in Mexico's
presidential elections.
Thousands of
Mexican election officials have fanned out across the United States to
supervise the
balloting, which
caps a campaign in which candidates barnstormed through Mexican population
centers in dozens
of American states. They lambasted U.S. policies, unpopular in Mexico,
on
immigration,
narcotics and other matters.
Fiction? No,
this is the scenario that emerges from a recent Mexican government study,
which, at the
request of the
Mexican Congress, offers detailed logistical options and budgetary estimates
for
extending the
vote to the estimated 10 million Mexicans living in the United States.
"It is viable," the report concludes.
Millions of potential
votes are at stake, perhaps 15 percent of the Mexican electorate, and the
Mexican Congress
must decide in coming months whether to approve any of the options the
report
outlines.
In the month
since the report's publication, opposition leaders have praised its proposals
as a
long-overdue
attempt to extend suffrage to migrant workers who have been disenfranchised
both in
Mexico and the
United States. But President Ernesto Zedillo's allies in the governing
Party of the
Institutional
Revolution, known as the PRI, have lampooned them as too costly and complicated.
For whom would
Mexicans north of the border vote? The conventional wisdom holds that they
would favor
the opposition because many migrants are thought to blame the PRI for the
economic
problems that
forced them to leave.
The debate gained
volume on Friday, as prominent American academics joined Mexican leaders
on
both sides of
the fray during a conference at Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte,
a
government-financed
research organization.
"The implications
of all this are frightening," said Rodolfo O. de la Garza, a professor
of government
at the University
of Texas, contending that an extended display of Mexican politicking on
U.S. soil
would provoke
a nativist fury in the United States directed not only at migrants but
also at
Mexican-Americans.
"When the rocks start flying, xenophobic Americans are not going to ask
for an
ID card," he
said.
Emilio Zebadua
Gonzalez, the counselor in the Federal Electoral Institute who coordinated
the study,
shrugged off
the criticisms. "We have to decide whether Mexicans who live in the United
States have
the rights of
other Mexican citizens," he said.
The institute's
voting study was set in motion in July 1996 when Mexico's Congress deleted
a clause
from the constitution
requiring Mexicans to vote in their home districts and mandated the electoral
institute to
study ways of extending the presidential vote to Mexicans abroad.
A number of other
countries allow their citizens living in the United States to vote in their
presidential
elections, but
none of the operations are on the scale that would be needed for voting
by Mexicans.
The institute
impaneled 13 demographers and other social scientists, and on Nov. 12 they
published
a 14-volume
study, one of the most detailed ever produced about Mexicans in the United
States.
Nearly 10 million
potential Mexican voters live north of the border, including 7.1 million
Mexican-born
immigrants and 2.7 million adult children of Mexican-born parents, who
could also
exercise the
right to vote under the Mexican Constitution, the report said. In addition,
about 100,000
Mexicans live
in the other countries, and voting rights could be extended to this group
as well.
Three out of
four Mexican immigrants live in 33 counties in California, Arizona, Colorado,
Texas,
Illinois, Georgia
and New York, the report said. The other quarter are widely dispersed throughout
the rest of
the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, with only 11 American states
having few or no
Mexican residents,
according to the report.
The report lists
procedures that would allow Mexicans in the United States to receive credentials
complying with
the exacting electoral standards that have allowed Mexico to largely eliminate
ballot
fraud in recent
years.
Six ways were
suggested for Mexicans to cast ballots in the United States. Most would
involve
establishing
polling places in consulates, churches, Mexican-owned businesses and immigrant
homes.
The report also
outlines the possibility of voting by mail or telephone.
Depending on
the registration and ballot procedure chosen, extending Mexico's vote north
would
cost between
$76 million and $356 million, the report said. The latter figure is roughly
equivalent to
the government's
entire yearly anti-poverty budget.
Considerable
debate at Friday's conference centered on how much interest Mexicans living
in the
United States
might have in voting in Mexican elections. Citing opinion samplings collected
among
migrants passing
through border cities and Mexican airports, the study reported that 83
percent of
Mexicans living
north of the border want to help choose the Mexican president, but that
many said
they could spare
little time to register or to cast ballots.
Wayne Cornelius,
a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego,
said an
increasing number
of migrants live permanently in the United States but remain interested
in Mexican
politics because
they finance construction of churches and other public works in their Mexican
hometowns.
"I consider these
voting proposals to be of fundamental importance for the democratic transition
in
Mexico," Cornelius
said.
Jeffrey Passel,
a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., also praised
the report but
questioned why
Mexico would consider allowing the 2.7 million children of Mexican parents
living in
the United States
to vote.
"Many don't speak Spanish and have never been in Mexico," he said.
Clark Reynolds,
an economics professor at Stanford University, said the proposals would
anger
many Americans
and undercut efforts to involve Mexican immigrants more fully in U.S. politics.
"This will cause
a political explosion, trust me," Reynolds said. "I know the United States,
and we've
not had a very
happy 10 years in U.S.-Mexico relations. If you go forward with these plans,
there
will be a huge
conflict."
Much discussion
centered on the 2.7 million potential voters who live in the United States
with no
immigration
documents. The report suggests that Mexico might seek to negotiate guarantees
from the
U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service that undocumented Mexicans would not be arrested
while waiting
to vote. But Roger Diaz de Cossio, a Mexican diplomat who designed an array
of
foreign ministry
assistance programs for migrants, scoffed.
"The INS has
laws to obey, and they're going to obey them regardless of whether Mexicans
are
going to the
polls," Diaz said.
Ernesto Ruffo
Appel, whose 1989 to 1995 tenure in Baja California made him Mexico's first
non-PRI governor
in the modern era, accused the authorities of whipping up opposition to
the voting
proposals out
of fear that migrants will vote against the PRI.
"I think that
fear is well-founded," Ruffo said. "So for the good of Mexico, it's important
to get going
on this now."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company