Lemus says the global economy is not working because “there is a huge disconnect between the multinational corporations and consumers, and it is threatening our democracy.”
 

“Corporations are no longer loyal to one market, and as a result they have no sense of national identity. They are actually becoming so big they are competing with nation states. They don’t respect boundaries, but they expect us to.”
 

Lemus spoke to more than 100 people earlier this week in Chicago as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP), an independent nonprofit organization fighting for worker justice in the global economy. Lemus is a USLEAP board member.
 

While increasing their power, multinational corporations also have systematically weakened government and unions, the two forces that could keep unfettered corporate greed in check, Lemus says.
 

Corporations and their allies in government make decisions behind closed doors that affect working people in profound ways, but workers have little say in what happens. For example, she says our trade policies have a direct impact on immigration, because they displace large numbers of workers. The main reason for the recent jump in Latino immigration to the United States is trade deals that benefit large companies and force down wages, she says.
 

Part of every deal we sign is a provision that removes public safety nets such as social security and opens the markets to allow huge U.S. companies to come in and undermine local businesses.

So when workers cannot find good-paying jobs in their country, they naturally look for places where they can get work, she says.
 

According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement failed workers in Mexico, Canada and the United States.
·           In each nation, while workers’ productivity grew, workers’ salaries remained stagnant or dropped and the wealth of those at the top increased significantly.
·           More than 1 million jobs that would have been created were lost in the United States.
·           In Mexico, many of the new jobs that were created were low-wage with no benefits and no future.
·           In Canada, the United States’s largest trading partner, wages stagnated and inequality increased.
 

But rather than negotiating deals that would help raise the standard of living in Mexico and other developing countries, Lemus says the Bush administration repeats the same mistakes and then complains when workers leave Mexico to come to the United States seeking a better life.
 

If we really cared about the people of Mexico, we would create jobs there that would allow them to make a decent living. We’re scapegoating immigrants for a problem they didn’t create. We’re attacking the symptom, but not getting at the root causes.
 

This scapegoating of immigrants in this nation, especially Latinos, is “getting scary.” Lemus, who speaks several languages, cites an example of this growing hostility from her personal experience a few weeks ago in the trendy, upscale Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.
 

I was standing on the street talking to some friends in Spanish, and a man comes up and grabs my shoulder and tells me, “You’re in America, speak English.”
 

With the upcoming 2008 elections, Lemus says, we have a unique opportunity to discuss globalization and immigration and come up with productive solutions. But that opportunity will be wasted, she says, if we don’t stop scapegoating other workers and realize that all workers have a common desire to live a better life, and that by organizing we can fight back against corporate greed and change policies that hurt working people.