Mexican 9 Month Work Visas

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.^[1][2] 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.^[3] In every telling, the plan was never implemented because the September 11 attacks intervened before it could be ratified.^[1][3]