ATACPAN, Mexico – Two lines of women and children form at the general store here on Sundays. One is for the local staple, tortilla dough produced fresh on a cornmeal press. The other is for calls from New York.

Nearly a decade ago, the store’s owner, William Cruz, built shellacked wooden telephone booths to provide a link to where most of the young men from the village now live: New York. “With so many people on the other side, we needed a telephone,” Mr. Cruz, 47, said. Today, the phones are so popular that a voice piped throughout the town announcing incoming calls competes with the church bells for villagers’ attention on Sundays.

In this village of 3,000, news of President Bush’s proposal for immigration reform, under which foreign workers would be eligible for three-year temporary work visas, elicits strong reactions.

Upon hearing details, Mr. Cruz smiled broadly. With three sons at the Bronx, one of whom he has not seen for four years, he welcomed the idea that his children might be able to travel freely rather than being smuggled across the border.

“What I’m thinking is, why doesn’t Bush let them pay a little and go directly by plane? Because many of them are in danger in the desert,” he said, referring to the most common, sometimes deadly, route taken north across the Arizona border.

Change could be on its way. Senators McCain and Kennedy plan to introduce immigration legislation this week based loosely on the president’s proposal, setting the stage for a debate on how to fix a system that allows 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants to live within America’s borders.

In New York, the group that would be most affected by reform is Mexican immigrants, about 80% of whom are undocumented, according to some estimates. With 122,550 residents, according to the 2000 census, Mexicans are also New York City’s fifth-largest and fastest growing immigrant group.

Here in Puebla, a verdant, landlocked state to the east of Mexico City, the New York connection is particularly strong. According to a recent study of the immigrant population by the Pew Hispanic Center, about 60% of the Mexican immigrants in New York came from Puebla, primarily from small villages such as Atacpan. For those Mexican migrants, the well-tread and illicit trail north of the border is currently through the treacherous Arizona desert.

That Mexican migration to New York, which has occurred primarily during the past decade, coincided with increased enforcement at the border. It shifted the flow from cities to the desert and upped the fees of human smugglers, who now charge about $2,000 to transport an undocumented person to New York from the border. Bandits known as cholos prey on the migrants, and the weather vacillates between extreme heat and cold. Hundreds of Mexican migrants have died in the past few years.

Mr. Bush has been eloquent in advocating for a “humane” system “that would bring millions of hardworking people out of the shadows of American life.”

He first outlined his guest-worker proposal in January 2004, saying it would match willing foreign workers with American employers, but the White House has never submitted a written proposal to Congress.

The Bush proposal, based on the assumption the worker will return to his country after the permit is expired, has been popular with business but has met strong resistance within the Republican Party and some immigrant groups. The latter have warned it would recreate a dynamic like that of the bracero program after World War II, through which more than 225,000 Mexican men were given temporary work visas.

Those workers were never given a chance for permanent legal status, and critics say it created a second-class labor force.

Still, the governor of Puebla, Mario Marin, whose father worked various stints as a bracero in California, sees such a program in a positive light.

“It would regularize the situation for many people who right now live secret lives,” Mr. Marin said. “It would favor both countries. The Mexican workers could travel securely; they could have a job in accordance with the law. At the end, they could return to their country with the product of their work.” The benefit for America, he said, is “it would open better control of the migrants.”

In a speech at the Naval Academy last Thursday, however, Mr. McCain, a Republican of Arizona, said that unless America finds a solution for the 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country, there will be no reform.

“There are some who say send them back to their countries,” Mr. McCain said. “It’s not possible. It’s not going to happen.”

Under the alternative that he expects to introduce with Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, illegal immigrants already in America could apply for a three-year temporary visa that could be renewed once.

After paying a fine, the immigrant could then “get in the back of the line” and apply for permanent legal residency. The senators’ proposal will also include a “temporary worker” program, like what the president has outlined, and enforcement measures designed to reduce illegal immigration.

That type of legislation could mean legal status for Brooklyn resident Esther Romano, but she is wary of any option under which she would expose herself to the government.

The mother of two American-born toddlers, Ms. Romano, 26, wants her children to grow up with the opportunities available in New York. A laundress in Sunset Park, she received only two years of schooling in her Mexican village.

In the fall, Ms. Romano flew with her children back to Mexico. Returning will be more difficult. She plans for her toddlers to take a five-hour flight back to New York without her in July, and she will head to the border to join a smuggler, or “coyote,” who will guide her through the desert.

Earlier this month, Ms. Romano, in a black leather jacket and high-heeled boots, cut a stylish figure walking the dirt trails surrounding the village. She stopped to visit at the wood-slatted home of a neighbor, whose 15-year-old son recently arrived in Sunset Park and has already landed a construction job there. The sister of the boy, a young woman in her early 20s, asked Ms. Romano if she was worried about the “vigilantes hunting immigrants on the border,” referring to the “minutemen” in Arizona.

“I’m not afraid,” Ms. Romano said, with a not-fully-convincing shake of her waist-length black mane.

Despite the challenges ahead for her, Ms. Romano does not trust the plan for guest workers. After years as an illegal immigrant, she worries about placing her name in an official database. Even if the plan includes a way she can legalize her status, as the proposed McCain and Kennedy bill is likely to provide for, she said she is afraid there would be controls on when she enters and exits the country.

Leaving the trails on the village’s outskirts for the paved main road, Ms. Romano pointed out homes built with money sent home from pressers in Brooklyn and night janitors in the Bronx.

Emigration has transformed this poor rural village, whose hills are dotted with apple, avocado, and pear trees. New homes built with glass windows, a luxury here, have shot up around town, standing like cement palaces next to the decrepit structures of families without relatives in America. Many homes now have phones, and some even boast satellite dishes.

Ms. Romano can identify each owner, with many of them living near her up north in Sunset Park. All are among New York’s bottom-rung laborers, and many have never returned to see their now-vacant homes.

Abutting Ms. Romano’s freshly painted, two-room cement home, which lacks running water but has two large beds and a wide-screen television, is a cinderblock structure on the verge of collapse.

It belongs to her brother-in-law, Apolinar Landero, one of the few men to stay behind.

At 40, Mr. Landero has settled into middle age, with a stomach grown too large for his worn shirt. He has permanent dirt beneath his fingernails, and his black hair is thinning. Just 15 years ago, he watched the young men begin to leave. He stayed behind, cultivating corn and beans for a large farm, out of a desire to stay with his family – and perhaps some fear of what would await him on the other side.

Today, he shares his platform bed with his wife, two of his four children, and the occasional rooster.

Given a legal way to leave, he said, he, too, would consider making the trip.

Mr. Landero found the temporary worker proposal very attractive. “I’m sure a lot would go,” he said. “There’s a great need.”

Coming back is a different story. “A lot of young men go to the other side. Those of 14 years already want to go, and they don’t return,” Mr. Landero said, watching the news on a tiny black-and-white television. When men come back, many quickly steal across the border again. “They come back, they’re already not adjusted to the life here,” he said. “It has a different rhythm.”

Back at his phone booths, Mr. Cruz said optimistically that at least half of the village’s residents would gladly sign up for a guest-worker program – even if it meant only a temporary stay in America.

“They would return because there are a lot of people who leave their families,” he said of the men of the village. “The truth is, many people do their three years and after five or six years they return.”

Next to him, Abrosio Alvarado, 27, said he had decided to do what most of his peers have done: move to New York.

“I decided I’m going to go,” he said, “whatever way – even if they don’t allow me to go.”