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Immigrants Come Because Globalization Took Their Jobs |
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Thursday, 07 February 2008 |
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Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.
By Jim Hightower The wailing in US about the “invasion of immigrants” has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, “Few of their children in the country learn English …The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” That’s not some diatribe from one of today’s Republican presidential candidates. It’s the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they’ve flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W’s current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness — around the time of the nation’s founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.” Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public’s anxiety and simmering anger about today’s massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate. Wedge issue There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show — as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country — that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they’re not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media. For the GOP candidates in this year’s presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on “English-only” proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it’s not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming. Why? The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it’s huge if you’re trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border. Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: “Up north, even though they pay more, you’re not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it’s comfortable. Life is easier.” Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican — yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love. Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico’s longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and “free market” ideologues. In the name of “modernizing” the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE — in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico — have laid waste to that country’s grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions. The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico’s ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong: Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since ‘94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families. Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs. Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA. Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day. U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land. Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour. Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer. Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed. So, here’s the deal: Thanks to Mexico’s newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do? It’s this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country — none — the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who: Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs. Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts. Stopped enforcement of America’s wage and hour laws. Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations. Illegally reclassified millions of employees as “independent contractors,” leaving them with no benefits or labor rights. Subverted the right of workers to organize. Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart. Made good healthcare a luxury item. Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties. Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many. Powerless immigrants didn’t do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. The fix Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can’t fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws — from wage and hour rules to the NLRB — so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights. Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an “immigration policy” that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate. America’s immigration problem is not down on the border, it’s in Washington and on Wall Street. |
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