Issue Will Be Recast as One of National Security; Daschle, Gephardt to Meet With President Fox

By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 14 -- Mexican and U.S. officials are relaunching talks on immigration reform that stalled after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, recasting the issue
more as a matter of national security in light of Washington's new priorities.

Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who will travel to Mexico on Friday for a meeting
with President Vicente Fox, said today in Washington that their basic commitment to immigration reform had not changed since the attacks.

Daschle said that identifying and legalizing "hard-working, taxpaying" Mexican workers in the United States could enhance national security because they would be
subject to an FBI background check.

"We must not let the terrorists who took advantage of our open society stall progress for immigrants who pay taxes and contribute to our country in so many ways,"
Gephardt said.

Fox in recent days has returned to publicly advocating changes in immigration policies, saying last weekend that he hoped that "we will pick up the agenda where it
was left before September 11 and continue advancing with it."

Only days before the attacks, when Fox was feted at a White House state dinner, immigration reform also seemed to be one of President Bush's top priorities. But
momentum to grant legal status to some of the millions of Mexicans illegally in the United States vanished on Sept. 11.

Since then, Fox has tread lightly on the issue. Washington has been focused almost exclusively on the war against terrorism, and sentiment is growing, including in
Congress, that immigration and border controls should be tightened in the name of national security.

In response, Fox's government is drawing distinctions between foreign terrorists who come to the United States and impoverished Mexicans who enter illegally to fill
modestly paying jobs in fields such as construction and child care. Mexican officials are also arguing that one way for the United States to get a better handle on who
is in the country is to document people working in the shadows.

"We would like to relaunch the agenda and recast it in the aftermath of September 11," Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda said in an interview.

Mid-level officials from both countries will resume talks on immigration in Washington on Tuesday. The talks will continue the dialogue begun when Bush and Fox
created an immigration panel in February headed on the U.S. side by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and on the
Mexican side by Castaneda and Interior Minister Santiago Creel.

The day before the meeting, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Fox's national security adviser, will meet in Washington with Tom Ridge, director of the White House office of
homeland security. Aguilar Zinser will be joined by at least 10 other Mexican officials, including the heads of the top intelligence agency and the immigration and
customs agencies.

Bush has said he wants U.S. customs and immigration officials to work more closely with their counterparts in Canada and Mexico, to share information and
synchronize visa policies with the aim of creating a "security perimeter" around North America. Officials here said the meetings between Aguilar Zinser and Ridge
would explore those areas, as well as how to improve technology, laws and financing to help create region-wide customs and immigration databases.

Mexican officials also say they are striving to balance security concerns with the need to keep trade moving freely across the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. One
idea being explored would establish immigration checkpoints in Mexico far from the border where U.S.-bound goods could be sealed and certified, reducing
bottlenecks created by heightened security at the border.

"Security has to take its central place in the agenda, but not at the expense of displacing everything else," Aguilar Zinser said in an interview today.

Since the terrorist attacks, anti-immigration groups in the United States say they have gained support for the view that the country has been too generous in admitting
foreigners.

The change in the public's mood has worried immigrants like Esperanza Chacon, a Mexican who moved to New York 11 years ago and works with an immigrants'
rights group there. She said the hope many undocumented immigrants had earlier this year to become legalized has evaporated.

"There's now a strong anti-immigrant feeling," she said. "There are 6 [million] to 8 million undocumented immigrants. Just because 14 or 15 are terrorists doesn't
mean all of them are."

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