[Peace-discuss] "Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There", by Jim Hightower

[Stuart Levy]

Mike Mulberry recommends this excellent article by Jim Hightower in Alternet:

    http://www.alternet.org/workplace/76076


It's well worth reading the full article, but here are some excerpts:


The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating [to the Mexican
economy]. 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.

 [...]

In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal
migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from
Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished
working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order
to help their families escape poverty.

Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up -- up at the
executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power
is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have
rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers
and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.

 [...]

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.