A Tex-Mex exchange: making it easier for cross-cultural exchanges between U.S. and Mexican students is the goal of some legislators.

Texas Senator Judith Zaffirini is not alarmed by the large number of Mexican residents who every day cross the World Trade Bridge connecting Laredo, Texas, with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

In fact, if those residents are students, she would like to see more of them.

"We are increasingly living in an international arena today, and these kinds of exchanges are good for the students of both countries because it gives them the opportunity to learn about one another's culture and to network," Zaffirini says.

Every year hosts a reception at the Capitol honoring the roughly 1,800 students from Mexico who study at the University of Texas.

Although California, Arizona and New Mexico also share the border with Mexico, the border between Texas and Mexico is the longest, which partly explains why two- and four-year schools in Texas have more Mexican students, 4,978 in 2003, than any other state.

By contrast, according to the Institute of International Education (ITE), California universities and colleges were attended by 1,292 students from Mexico in 2003, followed by Arizona at 1,280 and New Mexico, with only 225 students.

That Mexican students, unlike most of their counterparts from other foreign countries, often cross the border daily and endure hardships to attend U.S. schools should not come as a surprise, says Alvaro Roma, the executive director of international programs with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities in San Antonio.

"Mexican students put a high value on education and therefore are amazingly persistent in spite of the odds against them," says Roma.

Some lawmakers are looking for ways to make it easier both for students coming to the United States as well as those who travel from north of the border to study in Mexico (some 8,078 for the 2002-2003 school year).

"You have to build partnerships," says former Texas Representative Tim Von Dohlan, who in 1991 sponsored legislation making it easier for Mexican graduate students to attend graduate schools in Texas.

"At that time, Mexico was lacking in programs at the graduate level," says Von Dohlan, "so we passed legislation saying that such students could come to Texas and be treated as a resident of our state with the agreement that when they went back to Mexico they would use the skills they had acquired here to help build the infrastructure that was needed in their country."

California lawmakers in 2001 passed a bill allowing for the exchange of up to 1,000 Mexican students and 1,000 California students to attend each other's schools. Because that bill also asked for $75,000 to help fund such exchanges it was ultimately vetoed by then-Governor Gray Davis who was wrestling with an historic budget shortfall.

But because California already allows its higher education system to enter into cooperative student exchanges with Mexican colleges and universities, some educators thought the legislation, while well-meaning, was unnecessary.

"The University of California has the authority on its own to do things like waive tuitions for Mexican nationals, the same thing is true for California State University," says Bruce Hamlett, chief consultant with the California Assembly's Higher Education Commission.

"And that is how the majority of Mexican students work things out here," continues Hamlett, "they do it on an institution-to-institution basis. The only thing that lawmakers could do to help it along would be to provide some kind of funding, but from what I have seen, these waivers and student exchanges have so far been working."

Texas Senator Zaffirini says she would like to see more legislatures promote student exchanges. The number of students from Mexico is expected to increase not just in those states hugging the Mexican border, but also in Illinois, Florida, New York and Michigan, states that already have significant percentages of Mexican nationals studying at their colleges and universities.

"Legislatures can promote programs of reciprocity, not just focusing on the students from Mexico who want to come to the United States, but the many students in the U.S. who want to go to Mexico," says Zaffirini.

Zaffirini notes that a Mexican student attending college in Texas pays the tuition rate of whatever school in Mexico he or she left and also receives credit from that Mexican school for the classes taken in Texas. The same process is reversed for Texan students attending school in Mexico.

"The idea is to make it as convenient as possible for students on both side of the border who want to be part of an exchange program," says Zaffirini.

Von Dohlan agrees. "If I were still in the legislature, I would want to explore the question of what kind of reciprocities can be developed that would have a mutual benefit to the students on both sides of the border. The more both of our countries work together, the more likely it is that we will both benefit economically."

Garry Boulard is a free-lance writer firm Albuquerque, N.M.