Immigration help sought

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said Monday he's getting support for his proposal to pull together Western governors to come up with solutions for the nation's immigration woes with Mexico.

"I'm pretty confident we're going to do something about it," Huntsman said in a telephone interview from Des Moines, where he talked with several of his Western counterparts over the weekend during the annual meeting of the National Governors Association.

He's pushing the immigration issue because of a pledge he made last week to Mexican President Vicente Fox. The governor was in Mexico City pitching an alliance between Utah and Mexico to promote trade as well as education and cultural exchanges.

Huntsman assured the Mexican leader that he'd take on the controversial topic, which had already been raised by other officials south of the border. The governor, who said he has no specific solution in mind, wants the help of the Western Governors Association.

Western states need to help the country move toward "a more realistic and manageable flow of labor to specific job opportunities . . . and also expediting the whole visa system, which today is broken. It is slow. It is cumbersome. It has a cap in place."

But the most difficult issue to deal with will be "what to do about the 4 million to 5 million Mexican nationals who are now in the United States," the governor said, adding there's "an emerging consensus" that the government will find a way to better track workers in the future.

Any changes to immigration policy, of course, will have to come from Congress. But Huntsman said there's a "sense of indifference" in the United States on the issue, one that governors can help overcome.

Hopefully, the governor said, the Western Governors Association could schedule a summit devoted to the issue by the end of the year.

Although the chairwoman of the Colorado-based organization, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, is on a trade mission to London and did not attend the meeting in Des Moines, other Western governors were there.

Huntsman said he was able to discuss tackling immigration with the vice chairman of the Western Governors Association, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, as well as with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Both were interested, Huntsman said.

Richardson is already a Huntsman ally on another issue — a Western states primary for the next presidential election in 2008. Although the idea has been tried before, Huntsman said he believes it can work this time.

The key, the governor said, is holding simultaneous primaries in multiple states early enough in the process to attract the presidential candidates to the West, and to focus on Western issues — including immigration.