Immigration
Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's
Disastrous
Impact on Mexican Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
April 25, 2006
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.
