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Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed 'free trade' has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America's 11 to 12 million illegal aliens.
NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected.
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 the Mexican farmer 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 many so 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 crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.
So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China's even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.
But Mexicans must still contend with the results of the American-owned 'maquiladora' sweatshops: subsistence-level wages, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions (cardboard shacks and open sewers), and a lack of resources (for streetlights and police) to deal with a wave of violence against vulnerable young women working in the factories. The survival (or less) level wages coupled with harsh working conditions have not been the great answer to Mexican poverty, while they have temporarily been the answer to Corporate America's demand for low wages.
With US firms unwilling to pay even minimal taxes, NAFTA has hardly produced the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, whose city is crammed with US-owned low-wage plants, expressed it plainly: "We have no way to provide water, sewage, and sanitation workers. Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth."
Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so many desperate Mexicans -- lured to the border area in the false hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras -- are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.
NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to promote rising living standards, health care, environmental cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico. The wholesale surge of Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the border.
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 to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican workers.
Meanwhile, with the planned Central American Free Trade Agreement with five Central American nations coming up, we can anticipate even greater pressure on our borders as agricultural workers are pushed off the land without positive, alternative employment opportunities. People from Guatemala and Honduras will soon learn that they can't compete for industrial jobs with the most oppressed people in say, China, by agreeing to lowering their wages even more. Further, impoverished Central American countries don't have the resources to deal with the pollution and crime that results from moving people from rural areas to the city, often without their families.
Thus far, we have been presented with a narrow range of options to cope with the tide of illegal immigrants living fearfully in the shadows of American life. Should they simply be walled off and criminalized, as Sensenbrenner and House Republicans suggest? The Sensenbrenner option seeks to exploit the sentiment that illegal immigrants entering the US -- rather than US corporations exiting the US for Mexico and China -- are the primary cause of falling wages for most Americans.
The Bush version is only slightly different, envisioning the illegal immigrants as part of a vast disposable pool of cheap labor with no meaningful rights on the job or even the right to vote, to be returned to Mexico upon the whim of their employers.
Yet there is another well-known path of economic and social integration that has been ignored in the debates over immigration in the US: the one followed by the European Union and their "social charter" calling for decent wages, health care, and extensive retraining in all nations. Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water, and education. The implementation of democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital pre-condition for entry into the EU.
The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to question the widely-held assumption that what benefits American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn't about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary people being able to achieve their dreams.
The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs -- not maximum profits-- are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.
Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom.
Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter are Milwaukee-based writers and activists. They can be reached at winterbybee@earthlink.net.
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3:09:43 PM 
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Lawrence O'Donnell: Who Asked Rove to Return. Karl Rove's return to the grand jury today could mean the end of the Rove investigation or the beginning of the Rove prosecution. It depends on who asked Rove to return. If Fitzgerald asked Rove to return to the grand jury, that means Fitzgerald thinks he doesn't have enough for an indictment. If Rove asked to return to the grand jury, that means Rove's lawyer, Bob Luskin, believes an indictment is imminent and is sending his client back to make a final desperate attempt to avoid indictment. Luskin did this once before when he told Fitzgerald about the Viveca Novak connection, which is certainly going to be covered in Rove's testimony today. Luskin has experienced extreme mood swings in his willingness to talk to the press about this case. If a reporter can ask him one question today, it should be who asked Rove to return to the grand jury?
P.S. For what it's worth, the buzz among the Washington press corps right now is that Rove asked to return to the grand jury.
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12:01:36 PM
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Harry Shearer: Rotten at the Corps. Hello, from New Orleans again. First the good news: as the Times-Picayune reported recently, forget about "Katrina cough". One thing not to worry about as we prepare to experience Jazzfest '06.
Now the other news. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post and the TP had complementary stories on the cascading tiers of subcontractors in the Army Corps of Engineers' way of doing business--in Iraq and in New Orleans--and how that cascade drained most of the billions away from the jobs to be handled, removing debris and building medical clinics. Yesterday's NYT had a closer-focus approach to one job in Iraq, a high-priority oil pipeline across the Tigris River, and we can see the same approach to problems--dismissive, protective of the prime contractor--that the Corps appears to have used in the construction, and the recent reconstruction, of flood defenses in New Orleans. Since, from all I've read, the Corps appears to do no engineering, and not even proper supervision over the contracts they let out, my question is: why do we need the Army Corps of Engineers? Can't we just hire the Dutch to fix what the Corps did wrong in New Orleans?
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9:53:10 AM
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Marty Kaplan: Barnes to Snow: Stonewall. To celebrate the announcement of Fox's Tony Snow as White House press secretary, Fox had Fred Barnes and Juan Williams on to speculate about the impact.
Williams said that, because Tony had worked for various media outlets, he knows what reporters need, and he'll give them what he can, which will mean a better working relationship between the administration and the press.
Barnes would have none of it. The last thing Tony should be, he said, is Mr. Nice Guy. If Snow is asked about his paper trail of comments criticizing Bush, now circulating among those pesky bloggers, Barnes said he should tell reporters that he's not going to comment on any of that, nosiree; his job now is to serve the president, not to rehash the past.
It's refreshing to have the Faustian bargain of serving this administration made so explicit. In exchange for Snow's gaining immortality -- which in this era means being on television so much that his post-Bush speaking fees will exponentially soar -- all he has to give up is everything he stands for. Those anti-Bush cracks? Inoperative. Next question.
The problem with the McClellan robot wasn't that he was clueless about what was going on in the West Wing; it was that he wasn't charming enough, that he couldn't be reprogrammed with a new set of "...ongoing investigation that is ongoing..." loops, that he seemed to have lost interest in attempting to convince the press corps that they had any reason to believe him.
But as Snow's Fox colleagues attested, McClellan's successor is amiable and good-looking (the two essential signs of gravitas). When Snow stonewalls the press, they'll know he's a true insider, and that he's doing it out of professionalism, not because he's a scared chipmunk. With Bush's approval rating approaching Nixon's, it's comforting that this White House understands the priority of filling not just Scott McClellan's shoes, but Ron Ziegler's.
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9:50:29 AM
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Trey Ellis: It's Official. I Now Pity George Bush.. Before you start firing off rude, biting comments hoping to make me cry, just put yourself in his shoes for a minute. He's broken the United States of America. He was given the most powerful nation the world has ever known and driven it right into the ground. I mean, how would you feel? Especially if you came from a high-achieving family. Like most guys he tried to follow in the footsteps of his dad. But what if your dad was a decorated WW II fighter pilot, college baseball star, Ambassador to the U.N., C.I.A. Director and President of the United-States? You might not even try to amount to anything for, say, the first forty-seven-years of your life.
But you watch your little brother Jeb get the good grades and the praise from the 'rents. You can't just sit back and watch him rise and rise without making one last stab at success. Like two kids playing Risk, you divide up the nation. You run for governor in Texas, little Jeb takes Florida.
This time your the one who wins. Jeb has to try again.
Now everything's changed. You're on your way to showing that hardass dad of yours that he was wrong about you all these years. And by the way, he might have been a great war hero but he was only a mediocre President. You'll get to the White House and laugh last and so loud they'll hear you all the way back in Midland.
No mediocre Presidency for this son. No. You're swinging for the fence.
And it sort of works for a while. Big ideas and big opportunities. Your advisors assure you that you can play war and cakewalk to a win. Then it goes bad. And worse. The damn war never ends. Poll numbers crater. Nobody's comparing you to Lincoln or Roosevelt. Now they're comparing you to Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez.
First veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas calls you the "Worst President in American History." You laugh it off. She's an old crank anyway. Then professor Sean Wilentz writes a cover story for Rolling Stone calling you, again, the worst President ever. Not only that, but 81% of his fellow history professors have already declared your reign a failure. It's finally starting to sink in that Iraq is officially a defeat, the strongest military in the world dispirited and on its way to breaking, you've run up more debt than a drunken sailor before payday, your seemingly bulletproof political party looks headed back out of favor, Latin America is slipping out of your nation's sphere of influence for the first time in over a century, North Korea has acquired The Bomb. All on your watch.
What does he say to his mom and dad when they come over for dinner? Oops?
I can't help feeling sorry for him. I'm a Democrat. I always root for the underdog.
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7:52:05 AM
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Robert Weissman: Democrats and the Gas Price Crisis -- Another Opportunity to be Blown?. So now everyone is worked up about gas prices.
The Republican leadership in the Congress has called for Federal Trade Commission investigations into price-gouging, and President Bush amusingly has done the same.
This all reflects what the Washington Post concisely said in a Tuesday headline: "Cost of Gas Puts Pressure On GOP."
The Democrats, understandably, are very happy. People don't like high gas prices, and everyone understands the Republicans are the party of Big Oil, and thus get blamed for high prices.
But the Democrats are positioning themselves to blow the political opportunity, not to mention failing to advance a policy that would actually help consumers and the environment.
The main Democratic response has been to call for ... Federal Trade Commission investigations. OK, to be fair, what the Dems want would give the FTC power it does not now have, and perhaps would result in a more serious effort than what the Republicans have in mind.
But by way of contrast, consider this: three decades ago, when the oil giants profiteered in the wake of the first oil embargo, almost half the U.S. Senate voted to break up the integrated oil companies.
While it would make even more sense on the merits now than it did then, asking the Democrats to support such a move today is perhaps asking too much. (Beyond political cowardice, one reason the Dems may be uncomfortable going into this territory is that the oil industry consolidation that facilitates price gouging and other abuses occurred largely on Bill Clinton's watch.)
What is not too much is to ask the Democrats not just to blow hard about price gouging, but to support measures that would directly do something about it. And the simplest thing would be to enact a windfall profits tax, which would take Big Oil's ill-gotten gains, and re-direct it to consumers and, most critically, investments in renewable fuels.
There are such proposals in the Congress, made after the gas price spikes of last year, including the huge jump following Hurricane Katrina. However, just 40 members of the House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor the leading legislation calling for a windfall profits tax on the oil companies (H.R,2070, the Gas Price Spike Act of 2005, introduced by Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Only eight members of the Senate co-sponsored the leading windfall profits bill there (S.1631, the Windfall Profits Rebate Act of 2005, introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota). (To his credit, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was one of those eight).
The Democratic chatter inside the beltway is now all about delivering a "vision" and moving away from laundry lists. No doubt vision is important, though most of the discussion is really akin to commercial branding (Toyota is "moving forward," Chevrolet is leading "an American Revolution," Ford is "Built for the Road Ahead," etc.) than setting out real points of principle.
Lost in the discussion about "vision" is the absolutely vital discussion about line drawing - as in, how do the Democrats meaningfully distinguish themselves from Republicans.
Calling for better FTC investigative power doesn't meet the test.
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7:48:23 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
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