NAFTA lies are the real story behind immigration

I’ve written about this a number of times in the past, and I hate to keep beating a dead horse, but I don’t think this has sunk in for most Americans. Those self-proclaimed patriotic Americans who are against immigrants from Mexico streaming across the border and into America looking for a better life seem solely interested in blaming–and punishing–the victims of US trade policy. Somehow, it is seen by these misguided patriots as being wrong for immigrants to want to come over to this country in order to find work opportunities and achieve a standard of living that is being rapidly foreclosed in their own country. The way they frame the issue, these desperate Mexicans are sneaking into this country, thumbing their noses at the INS, taking advantage of our health care system and stealing jobs from hard-working American citizens. If only they gave some thought as to why there are so many immigrants uprooting their families and risking their lives to come work here as undocumented “aliens”.

Maybe there would be a little more concern for these industrious, hard-working Mexican laborers if some thought were to be given as to what economic forces, or “push factors” were creating the need for them to immigrate. For starters, NAFTA has been an unmitigated disaster for Mexico’s economy and working class, a deal sold to the country by the Wall Street wing of the Democratic party (i.e.: Clinton, Rubin, Summers, etc.), an idea they co-opted in many ways from their Republican rivals, as well as by the financial elites in Mexico. (The story of NAFTA and how it was dishonestly packaged and sold is brilliantly recounted in Jeff Faux’s Global Class War.)

As a new editorial penned by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter in Truthout makes clear, the legacy of NAFTA’s failed promises are central to the current phenomenon of illegal immigration to this country, a challenge that can never be solved unless the devestation wrought by these trade deals is finally addressed head on.

As Bybee and Winter note:

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA’s ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven Mexican farmers off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their “death warrant.”)

NAFTA’s service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.

Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the government-sponsored crushing of union organization, has resulted in sweatshop pay along the border where wages now typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

Maybe we should start asking why the so-called liberal US media doesn’t report any of these facts, which are obviously very relevant to the ongoing immigration “debate” which is being driven in large part by fear, ignorance and outright disinformation. Probably because the media, while moderately liberal on some social issues, is actually quite obsessive in its unbridled neoliberal free-trade orthodoxy.

The editorial also notes:

NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to heavily-subsidized US agribusiness products, blowing away local producers. Capital could flow freely across the border freely to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican workers.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the entire debate is the fact that many “progressives” are siding againt the immigrants without taking these important issues into account. As this Salon article makes clear, some progressive activists are so concerned with the impact immigration is having on unemployment and wages in the US that they have completely ignored the much bigger picture described above. Not only would reforming our destructive “free trade” deals improve Mexico’s domestic economy and take some pressure off of the supply side of the equation (that is, fewer immigrants driven by desperation to illegally enter the US), but would also benefit blue collar Americans, the manufacturing sector, etc. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has demonstrated its undying commitment to more of these pathetic trade deals with its passage of CAFTA, which many Democratic lawmakers were all-too-happy to support.

None of this is new, of course, but it’s time for Americans to realize who and what is responsible for the problem, and if they care about addressing the problem, then we as a country need to start taking positive steps to fix it. Educating ourselves about the impact of free trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA is a necessary first step. And as Tom Barry from the International Relations Center recently noted in a recent detailed research report on the subject, “A comprehensive immigration reform bill would also be formulated within the context of a domestic policy commitment by government to full employment at livable wages and working conditions.”