NAFTA Is Sucking Immigrants Over The Border
By Karl Abrams
When the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) began on New Year’s Day 1994, a new age of free trade
prosperity was expected to begin. Hundreds of thousands of US jobs would be
created, immigration from Mexico would slow to a trickle and the living
standards on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border would rise to new heights of
economic abundance. Unfortunately, this never happened.
Originally pushed through by corporate
interest, NAFTA remains a complex trilateral trade agreement which has
eliminated most tariffs on traded products between Mexico, Canada, and the
US.
The U.S. has already lost 3 million
manufacturing jobs and six million Mexican peasant farmers have been driven off
their ancestral land. They have had no choice but to migrate into Mexican cities
or find their sad way north into the U.S. as slave-wage migrant workers.
Mexico was once proud and
self-sufficient in terms of indigenous food supply. Now it has to import 40% of
its food for survival. Mexican corn (maize), for example, can no longer compete
with imported U.S. subsidized corn. The Mexican farm industry has nearly been
destroyed. As a result, the standard of living in Mexico has gone down and
undocumented immigration has risen by at least
60%.
It was Mexico’s former
President Carlos Salinas who signed the NAFTA agreement in 1994. What was he
thinking? Salinas was aware at the time that NAFTA would destroy the livelihood
of 10-13 million farmers and drive them off their land. He knew they would not
be able to compete with US and Canadian untariffed grain imports.
Salinas had hoped and assumed that
fruit and vegetable exports would offset the loss to grain farmers. He was so
wrong. Millions of farmers and their families have since gone broke, while fruit
and vegetable exports have only marginally increased.
NAFTA wrongly assumed that thousands
of Mexican farmers who cultivated corn for hundreds of years would smoothly
switch over to growing fruit (e.g. strawberries) and
vegetables.
According to agriculture
economist Professor Philip Martin of UC Davis, NAFTA proponents didn’t
realize the difficulties farmers would have making a smooth transition. Without
the Mexican government spending money on crop-change education and efficient
roads, the switch-over will continue to be
doomed.
Perhaps we should learn from
the European Union. They have already implemented their plans to subsidize the
infrastructure for poor countries like Portugal, Spain, and Greece to enter the
EU. In this way, European countries can better “converge
economically” and prevent mass migration of economically displaced people.
Salinas believed that foreign
manufacturers would hire low cost Mexican labor at fair wages. He knew that
industrial jobs in Mexico would be created by eager US investors. General
Electric, for example, has sent thousands of US jobs to Mexico. Today, the GE
conglomerate and its partners employ 30,000 Mexicans at 35 factories.
But, Mexican workers are only being
offered wages half of what they were in the past. And, as the products of
Mexican labor, from refrigerators to washing machines, are shipped back to the
US, the people of Mexico will find they’ve become poorer than ever.
In the last several months, tariffs on
US corn, beans, sugar and powdered milk coming into Mexico have also been
eliminated. This is going to further wipe out the livelihoods of a million more
rural Mexicans.
Farmers from across
the country gathered in Mexico City last February to protest NAFTA, demanding
renegotiation of NAFTA, restoration of grain self-sufficiency, and wage
increases.
US factories in Mexico can
now take advantage of cheap Mexican labor to produce cheaper cars. US companies
such as General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler can now ship cars and car parts
anywhere in the US in just a few days. By some estimates, 60,000 US car related
jobs have been lost since the NAFTA agreement
began.
We must continue to challenge
NAFTA as the root cause of Mexican immigration even as the Bush administration
refuses to renegotiate the treaty.
It
should be understood by all how NAFTA has forced millions of rural farmers off
their land, decreased Mexican manufacturing job income and increased general
unemployment. According to Harvard trade-economist Dani Rodrik, as the wages of
Mexican workers continue to fall, they will continue to migrate
northward.
The resulting migration into
the US has yet to be understood by the average person in the US. Instead of
understanding the bigger picture, there has been a dramatic rise in xenophobic
hate groups that turn a blind eye to NAFTA as the true cause behind the erosion
of worker’s rights on both sides of the
border.
If American investment has
flooded into Mexico to finance such factories and provide new jobs, why has the
number of illegal immigrants continued to
rise?
According to Robert A. Blecker,
an American University economist, the actual number of manufacturing jobs has
actually been decreasing (by almost 40%) since a high of 4.1 million was reached
in 2000.
According to the latest annual
report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the US
has increased almost 50% over the last eight
years.
Groups like the Federation for
American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which claim more than 250,000 members,
continue to have strong connections to underground white supremacist groups that
have emphasized racist conspiracy theories about immigrants poised to
“take over America”.
At
the same time however, a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of
California (PPIC) shows that “immigrants are far less likely than the
average US native to commit crimes” showing clearly that “long
standing fears of immigration as a threat to public safety are
unjustified.”
In fact, the PPIC
has shown that while the the number of “illegal” immigrants has
doubled since the 1994 enactment of NAFTA, violent crime have actually declined
by nearly 35%. Last month, Time Magazine has also verified that there is
“no correlation between immigrants and crime.”
But immigrant hate groups like FAIR,
hiding under the usual flag-draped guise of patriotism and main stream pundits
like Lou Dobbs, continue to misrepresent these facts through propaganda and
disinformation on TV and radio. So far, it has been a rare occurrence for our
politicians and law makers to make any connection whatsoever to the flawed
policies of NAFTA and its connection to increased
immigration.
As usual, the biggest
economic benefits are going to major transnational corporations like Archer
Daniels Midland, Cargill, General Electric and
Wal-Mart.
Let us demand from our
political leaders a complete review and renegotiation of NAFTA (including labor
and environmental provisions) and a freeze on new trade pacts.
Let us put pressure on US corporations
doing business in Mexico to contribute generously towards the billions of
dollars needed to stimulate new job growth in Mexico just as the European Union
is doing for members of its union.
Let
us welcome our newly immigrated Latino brothers and sisters with love and
respect.
Posted: Tue - April 1, 2008 at 08:18 PM
