GETTING TO KNOW YOU: AMERICA FILLS FOX'S DANCE CARD

WASHINGTON -- SOMETHING very curious is happening between the United States
and Mexico: the countries are seriously talking about thorny issues like
migration that for years had been the elephant at the party that no one
wanted to discuss.

American officials, for instance, had long criticized Mexico for turning a
blind eye to border control problems. Mexico viewed migration as a
fundamental right of its workers, who bolstered American industry and
provided an escape valve for Mexico's own struggling economy.

But President Bush made President Vincente Fox's ranch his first foreign
stop in February, and their personal friendship -- Mr. Bush had met Mr. Fox
at least three times when Mr. Bush was governor of Texas -- has almost
single-handedly transformed the tone of United States-Mexico relations.

The two leaders have broken new ground in talks about trade, energy and
fighting drug trafficking, and last Wednesday Cabinet-level officials from
both governments met here and pledged to work on a broad set of proposals
aimed at making the border safer for Mexican immigrants, expanding guest
worker programs in the United States and creating new incentives to keep
Mexicans from deserting their homeland for jobs in this country.

To be sure, all of this has consequences for Mr. Bush. If Mr. Fox can
succeed in stabilizing the border and strengthening the Mexican economy,
for instance, the United States stands to gain a stronger trading partner,
a safer, more secure, border and fewer problems with illegal immigration.
But Mr. Fox, whose election ended decades of one-party rule in Mexico, has
become a totem not just for Mr. Bush and the Republicans, but for the
Democrats as well. Both parties seem to see in the Mexican president a
rising star on the world stage, and a power broker whose ideas they can
play for their own political advantage.

Republicans see Mr. Fox, a former Coca Cola executive, as a hard- nosed
businessman out to fight corruption and drug trafficking, and promote free
trade and less-onerous regulations.

Democrats, for their part, underscore Mr. Fox's commitment to improving the
lives of migrant farmworkers in America. Also, of university students in
Mexico by providing them with high-speed Internet access to libraries
worldwide.

California's Democratic governor, Gray Davis, played host during Mr. Fox's
two-day visit to the state last month, squiring the Mexican leader through
Silicon Valley boardrooms (where Mr. Fox sought more high-technology
investment and jobs in Mexico) and migrant rallies in farming communities.
Mr. Davis is eager to shed California's anti- immigrant image, which grew
under former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, and from Proposition 187, the
1994 measure that sharply restricted benefits to undocumented immigrants.
(Not to be outflanked on Mr. Fox's California visit, Mr. Bush dispatched
First Lady Laura Bush to join Mr. Fox on a tour of an elementary school in
the San Fernando valley.)

"Fox is capable of being influential with the president, the Cabinet and
the Congress, on all levels," said Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas
Democrat who heads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Still, of all the issues driving the romance between Fox and the two
parties, immigration remains the most prominent. Since Mr. Fox's
inauguration, Senator Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican who supports expanding
guest worker programs, and the Democrat-dominated Congressional Hispanic
Caucus, which opposes Mr. Gramm's plan, have made pilgrimages to Mexico
City to win Mr. Fox's blessing for their competing positions.

IN an unusual accord, farmers and labor unions struck a compromise late
last year to gradually grant undocumented workers legal residency in
exchange for expanding and streamlining the current temporary visa program
that brings workers from Mexico for limited stays. But Mr. Gramm opposed
the legalization component and scuttled the deal at the eleventh hour.

Mr. Fox, sensing the political vise he could put himself in should he court
either the Republicans or the Democrats too closely, has been careful to
tell each side a little of what they want to hear without committing
himself to a hard and fast position. By doing so, the Mexican president is
maintaining the leverage he needs to continue wooing American lawmakers
from both sides of the aisle on the issue on which his own popularity at
home depends.

"Migration is the most fractious issue between these two countries," said
Demetrios G. Papademetriou, director of the international migration policy
program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they can
show show real gains and create experiments where they test each other,
then there will be a greater willingness to deliver on other promises."

Mr. Fox is interested in Mr. Gramm's guest worker program as a way to allow
Mexicans to come home with skills and money for the Mexican economy. But
Mr. Fox also needs some sort of legalization plan to avoid alienating his
liberal supporters in the United States.

"If the purposes are in conflict, it could sink the whole deal," said Rick
Swartz, an immigration advocate in Washington who has close ties to the
Mexican government.

For his part, Mr. Bush has signaled he wants some kind of deal on the guest
worker issue, but has been cool to an amnesty, a politically charged term
that has been banned from the Fox-Bush dialogue in favor of the
deliberately vague word "regularize."

But as Democrats and Republicans joust to court the Mexican president, Mr.
Fox may see to it that the concept becomes the centerpiece of a new foreign
policy. "The jury is still out on how far Fox will get on defining the
interests of farmworkers, both documented and undocumented," said Ramon
Ramirez, president of the Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United,
Oregon's farmworker union, in Woodburn, Ore. "But it's encouraging. A lot
of people are watching."