SANTA ANA DEL VALLE, Mexico · Proposals for U.S. migrant worker reforms may decide the fate of half-deserted Mexican villages such as Santa Ana, where almost all the able-bodied men have gone to the United States.

As the town with the highest per capita migration rate in Mexico -- just under half of its households have at least one family member working in the United States -- Santa Ana could be repopulated or left even more empty, depending on how, or if, U.S. rules are changed.

That goes for hundreds of similar villages across Mexico. About 10 percent of the country's population has already gone north, and an additional 20 percent say they would consider doing so if they could get visas.

Undocumented migrants who once traveled back and forth to their hometowns have increasingly been staying in the United States because of increased border security since the Sept. 11 attacks. The result is divided families, desolate towns and half-finished houses started by migrants who hoped to return one day but never came back.

But the migrant workers of Santa Ana could return, at least on the weekends or holidays, under President Bush's proposal to allow temporary work visas.

"I want my parents to come home," says 6-year-old Cynthia Gonzalez, who has lived with her grandmother since her parents left to work in California four years ago.

"They told me they would, that they'd come back to be with me."

When the headmaster asks students at Cynthia's school how many have parents or other relatives in the United States, more than half of her nervous, giggling first-grade classmates step forward.

Mexican migrants work all over the United States, from big cities in the West to small towns in Georgia. They usually follow friends and relatives to a certain city and work in the same industry. Often, the local migrant smuggler -- there is usually one in every migrant town -- determines where people end up.

Bush's proposal has drawn criticism from people opposed to encouraging migrant workers.

And there are those who want to make it even easier for migrants, proposing to give migrant workers legal residency in the United States and the right to take their families north with them.

That could wind up emptying Santa Ana and other Mexican towns almost entirely.

"It would be good for them to get legal residency up there, but Santa Ana could wind up losing a lot of its residents," says Primo Aquino, 35, while weaving one of the town's intricate carpets.

Aquino says he is practically the only male in his age group who hasn't left Santa Ana, a Zapotec Indian town of 1,200 people in the brown hills east of Oaxaca city.

"Just us old men are left here," says the deputy mayor, Roman Bautista, 62. "We'd like our people to return, especially our children."

The town operates on an ancient Indian shared-labor system, in which almost every service -- administration, police, government -- is filled by rotating volunteers.

Teacher Eleazar Pedro Santiago says that elsewhere in the mountains of Oaxaca state, he's seen several "ghost towns" with just a few old people and farm animals.

Bush's program would allow migrants to work at least three years in the United States, enough time, he says, to save up money to start small businesses back in their hometowns.

But the migrant-owned bakeries or groceries that already dot Santa Ana have few customers.

"Everybody has the same idea: to earn money up there and start a business back here," says Aquino, the weaver. "What they don't think about is: What are they going to sell and who are they going to sell to?"

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