The International Organization for Migration calculates that there currently are 175,000,000 immigrants throughout the world, that is, people outside of their country of birth. Failed neo-liberal economic policies intended to generate employment and reduce poverty are culprits for this massive human flow from the global south to the global north. Immigration is a means of survival for many world citizens. While leaders of sending and receiving countries alike advise against immigration, remittances are imperative to keeping many smaller economies from crashing while corporations in receiving countries thrive from the abundance of immigrants as a cheap and easily exploitable labor force. Miguel Pickard of CIEPAC has articulated in a recent report that liberalization of Mesoamerican economies has left millions of people to choose one of three options: work in the informal sector, dedicate themselves to illicit activities, or migrate.
According to the World Bank’s distorted definition of poverty and 2000 data (living on less than $2 per day), over 75% of the Mexican population is poor. This is despite implementation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which in theory was to create jobs, lower consumer prices, and reduce poverty in all three countries. This in turn would halt the immigration trend. Yet as predicted by economic studies on both sides of the border, NAFTA´s catastrophic affects in the Mexican countryside has skyrocketed internal migration to large cities and immigration to the US.
Throughout the entirety of Mesoamerica, jobs are actually being eliminated more quickly than created in the farming, industrial, and services sectors (Pickard, 2005). Working conditions in the few maquiladora jobs created by NAFTA are horrific. This hardly creates a viable option, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, by 2001 the real value of the average manufacturing wage had dropped by 21%, and the average wage drop for all workers was 34%. Meanwhile, the cost of the official "market basket" of food, housing, and essential services has risen significantly. Minimum wage is $45 pesos per day, yet the basic food basket costs $55 pesos (En Voz Alta, June 1, 2005). Many products such as milk, chicken, bread, and even beans, are actually cheaper on the U.S. side of the border!
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The Mexican economy and rural social fabric are in shock because of liberalizing the economy. Anti-campesino policies in Mexico make survival in countryside nearly impossible. While subsidies do exist, the majority goes to large foreign owned agro-businesses and not small farmers. The Mexican government has not granted subsidies on corn or beans since the signing of the NAFTA in 1994, despite that the agreement allows for continued subsidies until 2008 to protect national producers from external competition. They have done this knowing that 15,000,000 of the Mexican population (15%) depends upon corn harvests, and that subsidized US corn sold in Mexico at dumping prices (lower than production costs) would only increase immigration. In the US farmers (mostly agribusiness) receive over $10 billion each year in subsidies. This is over 10 times the total Mexican agriculture budget! Since 1994 Mexican corn prices have fallen 70%, yet almost ironically the price of corn tortillas (which represents half of the calorie intake for many poor families), has risen by 50 % (Globalization and Migration). More than 50,000 Mexican producers are forced from their lands each year as a result (Pickard, 2005). Estimates to the number of people that will ultimately be displaced from these imports run as high as 15 million people, or 1 in 6 Mexicans.
This de-ruralization trend is killing the life of thousands of rural communities throughout Mexico and Central America and turning them into ghost towns. Youngsters who cannot find adequate employment or a decent wage in their country even if they finish secondary or high school, see migrating north as the best option. Academic degrees are of little or no use given the jobs most of them will be offered if migrating north. Migration is especially worrisome for indigenous communities, signifying great losses in culture, customs, festivities, identity, crops, traditional organization, knowledge, food and drink, resulting in a collective disorientation. Family disintegration is on the rise, as are drug and alcohol addictions and the sale of communal lands. Those who remain behind, typically the elderly, women, and children, though this is changing, use remittances for daily survival and minor home improvements. Little is used for savings or investment.
Remittances sent to Mexico are keeping the economy afloat. Each year the amount sent breaks the record set the previous year. In 2004 Mexicans in the US sent $16.6 billion dollars, amounting to $45.5 million each day. This is more that the amount invested by foreign corporations, the tourist income, or the net income from oil sales (Pickard, 2005)!
Numerous studies have shown that the U.S. economy would be in disarray if it were not for immigrant workers. The 2005 Economic Report of the President illustrates that immigration has become the key to growth of the US labor force and that immigrants provide a net fiscal benefit to the US economy. According to the report, over the next 50 years legal immigrants will add $407 billion to the Social Security system (Edwing, 2005). Companies want legal workers, but ¨flexible¨ ones they can hire at cut-rate costs while avoiding long labor relationships that could lead to accumulated benefits like retirement, health insurance or vacation time.
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Crossing the northern border for Mexicans has become a very risky endeavor, but even more risky is the journey required of Central Americans who must also make it through Mexico. This challenging endeavor was made worse by ¨Plan Sur¨, or ¨Southern Plan, ¨ implemented by Mexico after September 11, 2001. The southern border of Mexico has been militarized via Plan Sur to control the flow of Central and South American migrants and drugs and arms trafficking, most likely at the request of the United States. Countless military checkpoints must be passed through or evaded by exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and often frightened Central American migrants who are an easy prey to the hoards of Mexican police, immigration authorities, customs officers, army and navy personnel, and gangs who patrol the entire border zone and freight train areas throughout the Mexican Republic.
The Mexico-US border has been significantly reinforced since 1994, not surprisingly coinciding with NAFTA´s lowering of income for huge sectors of the Mexican populace. The US border patrol budget has been significantly beefed up so that we can have electronic sensors, high-definition video monitors, night vision scopes, armored vehicles, walls, dogs, rubber bullets, pepper spray, planes, helicopters, boats, horses, all-terrain motorcycles, bicycles, remote controlled ¨drone¨ aircrafts, portable lighting towers, ¨hollow point¨ bullets meant to explode on contact with the human body and produce ¨severe internal organ damage, ¨ and some 11,000 agents watching over 2,000 miles separating the two countries. Numerous of the US Defense Department’s Center for Low Intensity Conflicts-designed border sealing strategies with names like Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, CA, Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, TX, Operation Rio Grandee in McAllen, TX and Operation Safeguard in Tucson, AZ have been implemented in the past decade (US Department of Homeland Security and Pickard, 2005).
Despite growing militarization under fancy names, modern security and proliferation of resources, there is no evidence that the $20 billion spent by the US since 1994 to “strengthen” its borders has reduced illegal entry to the US, but it has made the journey more dangerous. Escalating numbers of migrant deaths have resulted from the shift from previously frequented border locations to more dangerous areas with inhospitable terrain such as the Arizona desert.
Groups like No More Deaths, Humane Borders, Border Action Network, and Borderlinks who working hard to raise awareness about border issues and to protect human and civil rights in the region are concerned about an increase in anti-immigrant paramilitary groups that fuel anxieties about terrorism and national security by broadcasting messages that the U.S. is literally “under siege” by immigrants and that federal law enforcement agencies have failed to protect citizens from this perceived threat. These groups have taken it upon themselves to watch for illegal border crossings, round up illegal crossers at gunpoint, and turn them in to federal authorities. In some cases, immigrants have even been killed. These groups include ¨Ranch Rescue, ¨ the ¨Minuteman Project, ¨ ¨American Border Control, ¨ and ¨Civilian Homeland defense. ¨ Much vigilante group membership consists of retired military, INS, and police officers, reflecting a current national agenda that attacks people of color (Border Action).
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We must challenge the status quo and seek alternatives to the current system that caters to the interests of large corporations and excludes practically all others. Elites from the North and South alike are uninterested in much change to the current situation. For Southern governments, massive out-migration in the past decade has meant less social and labor pressures at home, savings in the already threadbare public social services, as well as the advantage of having remittances pour into the country. Stopping immigration flows is not in the interests of Northern governments or businesses either, as it would mean a great loss of a huge labor component. With plans and accords like the CAFTA, FTAA, PPP, and IIRSA (South America Regional Infrastructure Integration Initiative) in the works, it is crucial that we say no to a model that has increased poverty and human suffering across the globe. We must play an active role finding alternatives that foster social equality, human rights, cultural diversity, environmental sustainability, and community well being.
En Voz Alta, (2005, June 1). CIPAC roundtable discussion, Maquiladoras en Chiapas.
Ewing, Walter A., (2005, May 4). ¨THE ECONOMICS OF NECESSITY:
Economic Report of the President Underscores the Importance of Immigration¨
