Mexican 9 Month Work Visas
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In the six to eight months before the September 11 attacks, per John Kiriakou, the Bush administration had negotiated a deal with the Mexican government to change the status of undocumented Mexican workers in the United States: they would be given nine-month U.S. work visas, during which they would have to pay federal income taxes, then return to Mexico for three months before reapplying for the following year, allowing them to work nine months a year in the U.S. and three in Mexico. Kiriakou has repeated the account elsewhere in nearly identical terms, calling the plan one that "would have legalized everybody" and "would have worked," and calling it a mistake that Trump did not revive something like it. In every telling, the plan was never implemented because the September 11 attacks intervened before it could be ratified.
