N A F T A A N D I M M I G R A T I O N 1

The RIGhT TO STAy hOMeAlternatives to Mass Displacement and Forced Migration in North America

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The RighT To STay homeAlternatives to Mass Displacement and Forced Migration in North America

edited by global exchange

The RighT To STay home:alternatives to mass Displacement and Forced migration in North america

© 2008 by Global Exchange

All rights reserved including the right to reproduction in whole, in part, or in any form.

This edition published in the United States of America by Global Exchange, 2017 Mission Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94110

www.globalexchange.org

Book Design: Global Exchange and Design Action CollectiveCover Design: Design Action Collective

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008938059

ISBN: 978-0-615-25267-4

Printed in the United States of America (2008)Published by:Global Exchange2017 Mission Street, 2nd FloorSan Francisco, CA 94110(415) 255-7296www.globalexchange.orgDistributed by Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store

Deep appreciation goes to all who have contributed writing and photographs to this report, as well as to the entire Global Ex-change editorial team –Shannon Biggs, Dwight Dyer, John Gibler, Emily Keller, Ted Lewis, Hector Sanchez, and Angela Walker. Thanks also to designers, Sabiha Basrai and Josh Warren White; and copy editor, Chris Dodge.

Front Cover Photo: Imperial County, California, USA. March 2001. Trained in hunting techniques, the Border Patrol agent estimated that migrants had made these prints twelve hours prior. Photo by Mizue Aizeki, first published in Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in An Age of Global Apartheid, City Lights Books, 2008.

Back Cover Photo: Peasant tilling his field in Michoacan. Courtesy of La Jornada.

To order more copies:www.globalexchange.org/the-right-to-stay-homeor 415-575-5541

Sonoyta, Sonora, Mexico. July 2006. Photo by Mizue Aizeki.

Table of conTenTS

inTRoDUcTion

Ted Lewis .................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

a noRTh ameRica ThaT WoRkS foR all iTS PeoPle Jeff Faux ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 10

The RighT To STay: Reactivate agriculture, Retain the Population

Armando Bartra ....................................................................................................................................................................... 18

eqUaliTy anD hUman RighTS, instead of Displacement and criminalization

David Bacon ............................................................................................................................................................................... 26

To RegeneRaTe WhaT iS oURS

Gustavo Esteva ........................................................................................................................................................................... 32

nafTa anD immigRaTion: Toward a Workable and humane integration

Laura Carlsen ............................................................................................................................................................................ 40

conTemPlaTing SolUTionS To migRaTion challengeS

Bill Hing ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 46

migRaTion anD DeveloPmenT: moving beyond nafTa

Amy Shannon and Oscar Chacon ......................................................................................................................................... 56

ReinvenTing The TRaDiTionS of The loWeR TRiqUi Region

María Dolores París. ................................................................................................................................................................ 62

againST The cURRenT: looking for alternatives to migration in the mexican countryside

John Gibler .................................................................................................................................................................................. 68

a mexican laboR PeRSPecTive on the issues facing mexican Workers in the U.S.

Bertha Lujan with Daniel LaBotz ...................................................................................................................................... 76

The UnexPecTeD conSeqUenceS of DeePening inTegRaTion: nafTa and immigration

Gabriela Lemus ......................................................................................................................................................................... 84

Contributors ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 92

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

6 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

inTRoDUcTion: The nexT immigRaTion DebaTe anD The RighT To STay home

by TeD leWiS

At the heart of the fierce national debate over immigration reform legislation in the United States lie the fates of more than twelve million undocumented immigrants, more than half of whom come from Mexico. This debate, which will return to the center of the political stage sometime after the inauguration of Barack Obama, pivots on whether U.S. policy should account for and integrate these immigrants, or reject and criminalize them. Yet an equally important question—often lost from view amidst the heated rhetoric and political posturing that accompany this issue—is what we can do to better the bleak economic conditions in Mexico that compel an additional half million Mexicans to leave home and enter the United States without documentation every year.

In light of this question and Mexico’s leading role in sending immigrants to the United States, we have invited a group of experts from both coun-tries to join in issuing this report, The Right to Stay Home: Alternatives to Mass Displacement and Forced Migration in North America.

The report’s authors include econo-mists, anthropologists, law professors, journalists, and leaders of social organi-zations. In The Right to Stay Home they share an array of recent thinking about the powerful forces driving Mexican migration north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The aim of their analysis, ideas, and proposals is to stir conversation among the public, advocates, policy makers, opinion leaders, and journalists who cover immigration issues, on how to ease the crushing economic pressures that have won Mexico the unenvied po-sition of being the world’s undisputed leader in out-migration.

Altering the well-established dynam-ics that underlie Mexico’s massive out-migration is not a simple task, and the critiques and proposals offered in this report reflect that. Our contributors of-fer elements of an emerging blueprint for change on both sides of the border. They put forward much-needed new ideas for policy change at the international level, ideas that are friendly to the interests of workers and small farmers. They call for reconsideration of counterproductive as-pects of current trade and immigration policies. Perhaps most importantly, the authors examine what will be needed to stimulate local economic development in Mexico capable of keeping Mexican communities intact and reining in the slow-motion exodus of recent decades.

Deepening the conversation about the root causes of immigration is essential to the political viability and long-term success of any true immigration reform in the United States. Likewise it is criti-cal to the futures of millions of Mexi-cans looking for opportunities to stay home in Mexico, or, for those who have already left, to return home.

Formulating genuine, effective immi-gration reform that embodies the best values of the United States and is ac-ceptable to the U.S. public and political representatives will challenge the politi-cal imagination and skills of any incom-ing U.S administration. And yet while a breakthrough on immigration reform is a widely shared goal, this report serves as a reminder that enduring change can-not be achieved without accounting for and responding to the realities faced by our southern neighbors. Nor can prog-ress toward genuine reform be based on the dangerous illusion that further armoring the U.S.-Mexico border or detaining and deporting an increasing number of undocumented workers can provide realistic, humane, or lasting so-lutions to our common dilemma.

Durable and just immigration reform must include a commitment to help stabilize Mexico’s most vulnerable im-migrant sending communities. Strate-gic investment of resources to concrete-ly support the ability of Mexicans to thrive at home should be central to the goals of policy planners in both Mexico and its neighboring trade partner, the United States. Likewise, a commitment to aiding Mexico’s communities should compel a comprehensive review of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that restores rights for work-ers, people, and nature. These are the issues taken up in The Right to Stay at Home.

During the debate over NAFTA’s adop-tion fifteen years ago, North American elites hailed the pending treaty as a unique opportunity for Mexico to at-tract foreign investment and achieve rapid development. Some of the agree-ment’s more Pollyannaish boosters, like Mexico’s then-president, Carlos

Photo by John Gibler

i n T R o D U c T i o n 7

Salinas, predicted that under NAF-TA, Mexico would soon rank among the powerful economies of the “first world,” thereby eliminating economic motives for emigrating north.

Sadly, fifteen years after NAFTA be-came law the new opportunities prom-ised by its boosters have failed to ma-terialize. In fact, the economic gap between Mexico and the United States has continued to widen in terms of av-erage wages, per capita GDP, and other key measures. In addition, income in-equalities have widened within both Mexico and the United States during the same period.

During the first decade and a half of NAFTA, the rate of Mexican migration to the United States has more than dou-bled, despite newly built border fortifica-tions that have made the journey north ever more costly, arduous, and deadly. Since 1995, when construction of the post-NAFTA border fortifications began, death rates have climbed steadily along the U.S.-Mexico border. By August 2008, a total of 4,827 had died. That means that since 1995, immigrants crossing the 1,969 miles of border between our two countries have died at a rate seventy times higher than that of East Germans killed crossing the Berlin Wall during its twen-ty-eight years of operation.

(For more background, see the accom-panying box entitled “Mexico’s Eco-nomic Crisis of 1982 and the Immigra-tion ‘Safety Valve.’”)

Improving economic conditions on the ground in Mexico is essential to any com-prehensive effort to slow or reverse the outflow of Mexicans to the United States. The people of both our countries have a common stake in making Mexico’s econ-omy work for its people in ways that will provide more opportunities for Mexicans to earn a living while staying home. But despite the compelling case for change, the initiative is unlikely to come from Fe-lipe Calderon, Mexico’s current ruler.

Douglas, Arizona, USA. June 2004. “We’re fortunate enough to live in a country where there are lots of opportunities. And most of the people who we run into out here want to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, it’s our job to stop that dream.” —Border Patrol Agent Elizier Vasquez, Arizona, 2007. Photo by Mizue Aizeki.

8 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

8 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

lines the need for continued input and pressure from informed citizens.

We offer The Right to Stay Home as some-thing for people to think about and a tool to engage their neighbors, communities, and political leaders in a conversation about what it will take to build a future in which North Americans are joined as good and helpful neighbors, rather than separated by hostility and deadly barri-ers. Breaking the false political frame that pits the rights of U.S. workers facing hard times against those of Mexicans fac-ing displacement by investing attention and resources to build opportunities for Mexicans to stay home has been the pub-lic policy path less trodden. Yet despite its challenges, it is the only path that leads to less immigration and a healthy future for our continent.

For more information and resources, please contact us at Global Exchange. For more copies of this report, please vis-it Global Exchange’s Fair Trade Online Store. We also encourage you to make use of the online version of the report, which is linked to more background materials and resources: www.globalexchange.org/the-right-to-stay-home. Sincere appreciation to Angela Walker, Dwight Dyer, Emily Keller, and HectorSánchez, and Michael O’Heaney for their indispensable assistance in putting this report together.

Any real plan for reducing economic expulsion from Mexico must include a substantial and ongoing investment of money, time, and attention to some of the country’s poorest regions and com-munities. It requires a profound shift in Mexico’s public policy priorities. The government would need to push for revision of some of the most damaging aspects of the current trade and invest-ment rules embodied in NAFTA, espe-cially the agreement’s agricultural chap-ter. It would also need to collect more revenue, especially from those at the top of Mexico’s income pyramid, needed to jump-start carefully targeted regional economic development. Felipe Cal-deron, a conservative and free-market devotee who rose to power backed by Mexico’s wealthiest citizens, has to date shown no inclination to do either.

In 2006 Calderón ran for president as candidate of the ruling Party of National Action (PAN). He took office following months of mass protest led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the opposi-tion presidential candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who claimed—along with millions of his followers—that fraud had thrown the election to Calderón.

Lopez Obrador, during his campaign, had called for revision of key NAFTA clauses and criticized the economic model that originally gave rise to the treaty. Calderón, on the other hand, explicitly ruled out any alteration of NAFTA, and since tak-ing power has joined ongoing efforts by the George W. Bush administration and the prime minister of Canada to expand NAFTA’s reach. Campaign pledges by Calderón to provide extraordinary sup-port for economic development of Mex-ico’s most active migrant “sending com-munities” have gone unaccomplished. For now, change won’t come from the top in Mexico unless there is renewed pres-sure from below or strong encouragement and support from its northern neighbor.

The United States, on the other hand, recently concluded a presidential cam-paign in which the topics of NAFTA and immigration have come to the fore repeatedly. The country is on the verge of a potentially significant political shift that opens opportunities to recast the immigration question in more realis-tic ways that move beyond the deeply flawed legislation, poisoned national di-alogue, and fatal political gridlock that killed immigration reform efforts in the 110th Congress.

President Elect Barack Obama ran on a party platform that acknowledges the need for the United States “to do more to promote economic development in migrant-sending nations, to reduce in-centives to come to the United States illegally.” The platform also includes a pledge to “work with Canada and Mex-ico to amend the North American Free Trade Agreement so that it works better for all three North American countries,” hinting that Obama understands—or at least some on his team do—that ad-dressing the challenges of immigration comprehensively means thinking be-yond the borders of our country.

The Democratic Party position offers hope that common sense might have a foothold in an Obama administration, but the notorious distance between the promises of political platforms and their implementation as public policy under-

i n T R o D U c T i o n 9

The origins of mexico’s modern economic woes go back more than a quarter century to the debt and liquidity crisis that hit mexico in 1982, which brought an end to decades of steady economic growth and broad government subsidies for the poor.

Paradoxically, new oil discoveries in the 1970s, that promised to be founts of prosperity, ultimately paved the way for mexico’s financial meltdown. easy international credit based on erroneous as-sumptions about potential revenue from new oil production led to a huge spike in government spending. borrowed funds supported investment in the oil industry, expansion of social and subsidy programs, and even went to prop up the critically weak national currency, the peso. corruption and misappropriation of public funds also played a big role in the government’s accumulation of more than eighty billion dollars of debt, twenty-five billion of which was owed to U.S. banks.

in august 1982, falling oil prices, high interest rates, and dwindling foreign reserves forced mex-ico to default and halt payment on these loans.

as the first domino to topple in a worldwide series of defaults by more than twenty countries, including other major oil producers, such as nigeria and venezuela, and large economies like brazil, argentina, and colombia, mexico’s response threatened the world financial system.

Under international pressure, mexico rescheduled its debt and accepted a $4.5-billion dollar “res-cue” loan from the international monetary fund (imf), conditioned on “structural man-dates,” which included strict fiscal austerity measures such as deep cuts in government food and social programs and a privatiza-tion program designed to reduce the role of the government in heavy manufacturing, transport, communications, agriculture, and other key industries.

both the “crisis” and the imf “medicine” caused great economic pain in mexico. however, even as inflation ravaged mexican household budgets and savings, mexicans suffered and complained but did not revolt. increased migration to the United States became a critical safety valve that released the potentially explosive political pressures that had built up during that decade. Today’s far higher levels of migration to the United States continue to protect the government from the ire of millions of mexicans who choose to flee mexico to seek opportunity abroad rather than stay home and fight for their rights.

mexico’s economic crisis of 1982 and the immigration “Safety valve”

Detail of mural in Altar, Sonora—a Mexican town close to the border. Photo by John Gibler.

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

10 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTiona noRTh ameRica ThaT WoRkS foR all iTS PeoPle

Jeff faUx

Dissecting the continent-wide web of po-litical and economic interests underpin-ning the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Faux links NAFTA’s failure to spur Mexican economic growth and job creation to the recent spike in undocumented migration. Faux examines North American trade and labor integration from regional and global perspectives, expounding the need to recast NAFTA and U.S. immigration policies within a conceptual framework that explic-itly acknowledges the trade-immigration connection. Focusing on improved Mexican economic competitiveness and income dis-tribution as key to reducing immigration incentives, he proposes EU-model “cohesion funds” to encourage institutional reforms and stimulate investment in Mexican in-frastructure and social development. Faux concludes with a call to develop and imple-ment a common legislative agenda, includ-ing a North American Bill of Rights and a Continental Development Strategy.

IntroductionImmigration, by definition, is a phenom-enon of both sides of a frontier. Yet in the United States it is commonly seen as an issue that should be addressed by uni-lateral U.S. government decisions. Thus framed, the public’s understanding of the immigration is too narrow to lead to sensible, humane, and lasting solutions. Not all recent immigrants to the United States are Latinos. And not all Latinos come from Mexico. But the dramatic in-crease in undocumented Mexican work-ers has elevated immigration to a divisive and potentially explosive issue. In the United States the debates for the most part ignore the conditions in Mexico that have made people so desperate that they risk their lives to cross the border in or-der to get grueling work at low pay. Also ignored is NAFTA’s major contribution to the problem.

NAFTA’s Unfulfilled Promises Promoters of NAFTA would rather for-get it, but a major part of their argument for the agreement was that it would re-duce illegal migration from Mexico. As the late political reporter Elizabeth Drew observed, “Anti-immigration was a sub-theme used, usually sotto voce, by the treaty’s supporters.”1 Often it was not so “sotto.” At a 1993 White House rally to pressure Congress to approve the treaty, President Bill Clinton promised that there would be “less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.”2 Said ex-president Gerald Ford: “We don’t want a huge flow of illegal immigrants into the United States from Mexico. . . . If you defeat NAFTA, you have to share the responsibility for increased immigra-tion into the United States, where they want jobs that are presently being held by Americans.”3 Another ex-president, Jim-my Carter, added that if Congress turned down NAFTA, “illegal immigration will increase. American jobs will be lost.”4 The anti-immigration card was not just played by U.S. leaders. When Mexican president Carlos Salinas came to Wash-ington to promote NAFTA he asked: “Do you want our tomatoes or our to-mato-pickers?”5 At the time, illegal im-migration from Mexico was not a major political issue in the United States. But instead of alleviating the conditions that were causing out-migration to the United States, NAFTA made them worse. Since its implementation in January 1994, the annual immigration of undocumented workers from Mexico has roughly dou-bled. In effect, NAFTA turned a modest and manageable rate of out-migration from Mexico to the United States into a political crisis on both sides of the border.

First and most obviously, NAFTA failed to deliver on Clinton’s promise of great new opportunities for Mexican families. The

widely publicized forecasts that the agree-ment would generate a massive economic boom south of the border turned out to be dead wrong. For example, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce predicted that Mexico’s growth would be “between a supercharged 6% a year, worthy of Asia’s tigers, and a startling 12% per year,”6 com-parable to China. Instead, Mexico’s growth has averaged 3 percent, far too small to provide jobs for its growing labor force. Secondly, the massive imports of subsi-dized grain, beans, and other commodi-ties from the United States and Canada, encouraged by NAFTA, has destroyed the livelihood of at least two million farmers and devastated the communities that de-pended on them. Migration off the farm was nothing new; it has been going on in Mexico, as in most of the world, for decades. What turned it into a crisis was the impact of NAFTA and the Mexican government’s brutal legal attack on small landholders that accompanied it, which produced the sudden and massive dislo-cation of farm families. The dislocation was deliberate. Behind their rosy rheto-ric, Mexico’s neoliberals and their U.S. collaborators were pursuing a large-scale program of government social engineer-ing aimed at forcing Mexico’s rural pop-ulation off the land and into the cities, making way for the corporate takeover of Mexican agriculture. Once in the cit-ies, the rural migrants were expected to provide cheap labor for the foreign in-vestment that NAFTA was supposed to generate. Ten years after NAFTA, Tina Rosenberg wrote in the New York Times: “Mexican officials say openly that they long ago concluded that small agriculture was inefficient, and that the solution for farmers was to find other work.”7

In order to calm the fears of farmers, the Mexican government promised generous

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financial and technical assistance that would enable small farms to increase their productivity in order to meet the new competition. But after the treaty was signed funding for Mexican farm pro-grams was severely cut back. Meanwhile Congress massively increased subsidies for U.S. agribusiness. This enhanced “comparative advantage” enabled U.S. food multinationals to drive Mexican farmers out of their own markets. The promised demand for labor in the cities never materialized. So the displaced campesinos joined the swelling army of unemployed and underemployed that feeds into the migrant stream headed north—to the maquiladora at the border and beyond. The communities left behind, deprived of men and increasingly of women as well, have been devastated. Those who stay are too old or too young to migrate. For the people who do remain, there are few options. In some places narco-traffickers have stepped into the vacuum, financing seed and providing protection for those who would diversify into rais-ing marijuana.

Class Across the BordersIf NAFTA had been the simple free-trade agreement that its supporters claimed it was, it could have been written on a few pages. Instead it is a thousand pages de-signed to expand and make permanent the transition to neoliberal economics in all three countries—Canada, the United States and Mexico—that had begun in the 1980s. Its core objective was to shift government policy away from na-tional economic and social development and toward the support of short-term profit-making opportunities through deregulation, privatization and erosion of the social safety net.

There were many motivations and in-terests that contributed to the political support for NAFTA. But one surely was the concern in Washington—after the Mexican presidential election of 1988—that some future leftist govern-ment might reverse the neoliberal “re-forms” of Mexico’s governing oligarchs. By facilitating business partnerships be-tween the rich and powerful in all three countries protected by an international treaty, NAFTA was an attempt to make these “reforms” permanent, thereby saving the Mexican elite from having to share income, wealth, and political power with their country’s people. After NAFTA was approved, one promi-nent Mexican analyst wrote that it was “an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding the ordinary people in all three societies.”8 In this sense, “ordinary people” refers to the vast majority in all three nations who must work in order to maintain a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. But NAFTA did more than leave them out. By providing extraordinary protections to private multinational in-vestors and undermining government ca-pacity to protect workers, farmers, small business, and others with weak market power, NAFTA was designed to reduce the bargaining power of ordinary citizens in the new North American common market that it created. So it is not surpris-ing that the growth that did occur after NAFTA further imbalanced the already uneven distribution of income among regions and people. In Mexico, growth has been heavily concentrated in the bor-der export industries, which do very little to develop local supply networks within the country. Domestic industries produc-ing for the internal economy—where the local multipliers are much higher—were

abandoned by government policy and increasingly undercut by North America retailers and Asian manufacturers. For those at the top on both sides of the border, NAFTA has generally been a great success. The story of the Citigroup purchase of Banamex is one illustration of how it worked (see text box). As this story illustrates, NAFTA has created a cross-border class of business and po-litical elites whose power and wealth is continental in scope. Yet the citizens of Mexico, the United States, and Canada are encouraged by their media and po-litical leaders to think of it in exclusively national terms. Thus, in a recent poll, a majority in each nation responded that the other two nations benefited more than theirs did.

“We had jobs in Mexico...What we didn’t have were salaries.”Courtesy of La Jornada.

12 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

tic market of over one hundred million potential consumers. The core problem with the Mexican economy is that it is ruled by an oligarchy of rich families in a system of hyper-crony capitalism. As in many developing countries, the largest part of Mexico’s economic problem lies not in restricted export markets but in the stifling maldistribution of wealth and power that restricts internal growth. There is a widespread assumption in all three countries that NAFTA was a one-time event that occurred some fifteen years ago. But NAFTA was designed to be dynamic, not static.. It is the legal, or more accurately the “constitution-al,” framework within which the con-tinental political class is busy filling in more deals and agreements away from public scrutiny. The Security and Pros-perity Partnership (SPP) is an obvious example. The SPP had two stated ob-jectives. One was to integrate the mili-tary and police functions in the “War on Terror.” The second was to further the neoliberal agenda with policies that would promote more continental deregulation and the privatization of natural resources, including Mexican oil and Canadian water.

There is nothing necessarily odious about governments cooperating in these areas. Whatever you think about the War on Terror, it makes sense for authorities to work together to keep people from setting off bombs in public places. The problem is that the SPP’s national se-curity agenda is a creature of the U.S. military-industrial complex and is an in-strument for spreading and encouraging the worst antidemocratic habits of the police in all three countries. The Mérida Initiative, for example, mimics the failed, wasteful, and disgracefully misguided U.S. “War on Drugs.” It is an arrange-ment in which Mexico gets guidance on how to control the drug market within its borders from the United States, which has proven unable or unwilling to do it within its own borders. Like the War on Drugs, it is largely a plan to fatten the

he has been silent about the harsh and brutal conditions suffered by Mexico’s own domestic labor force and migrants to Mexico from Central America. The wife of a Mexican official exclaimed recently at a private dinner party, “If the Americans seal off the border, there will be a revolution here.” But revolution or not, Mexico cannot develop by sending its most ambitious and industrious workers to the United States. The people who migrate are the working-class risk takers—those who save up the $2,000 to pay a smuggler to take them across the river and who, once in the United States, send home remittances out of their meager wages. Mexico needs these people. It paid for the cost of their upbringing and education, in effect subsi-dizing U.S. consumers of low-wage work.

Where We Are HeadedOn our current trajectory, things will get worse for as far into the future as we can see. Even the Mexican government ac-knowledges it; a November 2007 report concluded that even if the overall econ-omy grows steadily, low wages and so-cial inequality will continue to generate heavy out-migration to the United States at the current annual rate of roughly 500,000—for the next fifteen years.9 Mexico’s overall growth is actually flag-ging. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Mexico grew more slowly in 2007 than all but one country in Latin America. For 2008 it expects Mexico to be at the bottom—below even Haiti. The next few years look particularly grim. The slowdown in the U.S. economy has already rippled though Mexico. Remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S. have dropped two years in a row. Mexico may also be heading toward its own major financial crisis brought on by sub-prime credit-card loans from the almost totally foreign-owned Mexican banks to consumers who do not earn enough to pay them back.

Mexico is a not a naturally poor coun-try. It has plenty of resources, including oil, hardworking people, and a domes-

In fact, workers in all three countries bore the costs while their elites gained the benefits. In NAFTA’s first decade, real worker compensation (wages and benefits after adjustment for inflation) fell dramatically behind the increase in workers’ productivity in all three coun-tries’ manufacturing sector—which is where imports and exports are concen-trated. Workers’ productivity rose 68 percent, 33 percent, and 81 percent in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, respectively. Wages on the other hand, inched up 2 percent, 3 percent, and 5 percent. In the new North American in-tegrated economy, workers have more in common with workers across the border than they do with bosses who happen to share their nationality but are suppress-ing their wages. Since Mexico’s ordinary working people are generally poorer and live closer to subsistence than those in the United States or Canada, the effect of NAFTA and neoliberal policies have hit them the hardest. Hence the acceleration in out-migration. Like NAFTA, increased immigration to the United States—legal or illegal—ben-efits the rich and powerful on both sides of the border. In the United States, they have a source of docile inexpensive labor to undercut domestic wages. In Mexico, the oligarchs get a double benefit. First, remittances provide the economy with an annual injection of over $20 billion in hard currency. Second, they get to ex-port their most ambitious, energetic, and frustrated workers, who otherwise would be a source of political trouble. For Mexico’s elite, the public focus on the condition of Mexican workers in the United States also has the great virtue of diverting political attention from the condition of Mexican work-ers in Mexico. The current Mexican president—like the last one—has been loudly indignant, and rightly so, over the maltreatment of undocumented mi-grants at U.S. farms and factories. But

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First, North American economic inte-gration—whether it continues under NAFTA or in another form—is here to stay. We cannot put the toothpaste of NAFTA back in the tube. Every day more business connections in finance, marketing, and production are being hardwired for the continental market. Almost 70 percent of U.S. trade with Mexico is within the same firm or related firms producing the same final product. A wide array of manufacturers of elec-tronics, telecommunications equipment, textiles, and automobiles have perma-nent supply lines running across the bor-ders. For professionals from the United States and Canada—and increasingly from Mexico—career ladders are already

and humane society but in a continental market with robber-baron values and without a social contract. The result of our current political and economic trajectory is predictable. More uneven growth and economic dislocation, more out-migration, more ethnic tension between the legal and illegal members of the U.S. working class.

Where Do We Go from Here?Writer James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed unless it is faced.” A strategy for a change in direc-tion of trade and immigration policy must begin by facing some realities.

budgets of the police with money from outside sources that makes them even less locally accountable. Neither is it necessarily wrong for gov-ernments to harmonize laws and proce-dures to facilitate commerce. After all, Mexico, the United States, and Canada have been trading with each other for a couple of centuries, long before the ar-rival of NAFTA and neoliberal ideology. But the SPP’s economic agenda is entire-ly in the hands of the cross-border elite (its economic arm is the North American Competitiveness Council, composed al-most entirely of representatives of large corporations and banks from all three countries) whose interest is not in a just

The newly built border wall at Sasabe on the Sonora-AZ border. Photo by John Gibler.

14 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

makes sense. But opposition to immi-gration often spills over into xenopho-bia: “Mexicans are taking our jobs,” “Americans are taking over our busi-nesses,” “Canadians are undercutting our lumber prices.” Scapegoating foreigners can make it easier to gain popular support but in the end it makes it harder to create the cross-border alli-ance of ordinary people that is needed to challenge the cross-border alliance of elites.

Moreover, defense of sovereignty can also rationalize the neoliberal agenda. Politi-cians in all three countries have attacked efforts to put labor rights and standards into NAFTA and “NAFTA-Plus” on the

the treaty is not in the political cards. More importantly, polls suggest that al-though most Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. citizens think that their country has not benefited, most also think that integration is a good idea.10 This makes it easy to paint opposition to integration as essentially “reactionary”—an attempt to hold back the future.

In all three countries, the opposition to integration has been rooted in the defense of national sovereignty, with a strong flavor of simple nationalism. Since a strong public sector is essential to reclaiming democratic control over the market in all three countries, de-fending national government authority

continental. At the other end of the labor market, migrant workers from Mexico have spread to virtually every region in every industry to the north. Despite the barriers, many undocumented migrants move back and forth across the border. They are not as free to move back and forth as people from Mississippi who mi-grate to Chicago, but they are more free than undocumented workers from Rus-sia who migrate there.

Second, it follows that simply demand-ing that NAFTA be torn up and that we return to the pre-NAFTA world will not work. Barack Obama’s quick retreat on this point after his 2008 presidential pri-mary campaign illustrates that abrogating

Maribel Ramirez and Laura and Alejandro Langley top and bag onions at sunset. Onion harvesters work in the morning and evening, and don’t work during the early afternoon when the heat is unbearable. Photo by David Bacon.

a n o R T h a m e R i c a T h a T W o R k S f o R a l l i T S P e o P l e 1 5

grounds that it violates the sovereign right of each nation to manage its own social policy, while at the same time hav-ing happily given away the sovereign right to manage their financial markets and tax systems. A third reality is that none of the proposed immigration reforms in the U.S. debate lead to a permanent satis-factory solution. The generic solution of the Republican Right is simple and easy to understand: deport people who are here illegally and build an impen-etrable wall along the border. Deport-ing twelve million people is absurd and virtually everyone knows it. And while the wall and increased vigilance may have some short-term effect, his-tory suggests that it cannot stem the tide of desperate people. In contrast, the Democratic bumper-sticker solution to illegal immigration is to legalize those who are here. This is certainly a sensible proposal, since wholesale deportation is impractical. But it does not deal with the future. Indeed, it is not unreasonable for the average American voter to think that legalizing those already here would in-crease the incentive for those who still want to come. This in turn raises the spectrum of unlimited immigration—a political nonstarter. This has led some Democrats—includ-ing liberals like Senator Ted Kennedy—to endorse George Bush’s proposal to legalize future flows with a program of temporary “guest workers.” Popular resistance to such a program is high, however, and the House of Represen-tatives last year said no. This year the Senate approved a bill that would allow a maximum of two hundred thousand temporary workers from all countries to work here at any one time. This is the highest number that could conceivably gain enough political support for pas-sage, and it is too small to accommodate anything near the number of Mexican workers who, if current policies contin-

ue, will be heading for the border over the next decade or so. A fourth reality is that global compe-tition is dramatically undercutting the competitive position of the United States and the linked economies of Mexico and Canada, which like the United States are losing jobs to the rest of the world, particularly Asia. For the last two decades, this reality has been masked by the unique status of the U.S dollar as the world’s economic reserve currency, which has allowed the United States to borrow from the rest of the world in order to maintain its high lev-el of consumer spending, providing the chief export market for both Mexico and Canada. This is clearly not sustain-able and is now changing. Each of the North American countries will need a strategy to prevent further erosion of its living standards. Given the reality of the economic integration, a coordi-nated approach to the shared problem of economic growth is essential. This brings us to the paralyzing and con-tradictory paradox of the evolving North American market. Given the extent of eco-nomic integration, we need shared and co-ordinated policies to support a prosperous economy and a social contract that extends across the borders. But under current po-litical conditions, policy coordination will be dominated by business and political elites. These elites have little interest in making their economies as a whole (as opposed to their particular investments) prosperous, just and humane. There is an old political saying: “You can’t beat someone with no one.” That is, you cannot win elections just by criticizing a bad candidate; you have to have a candidate of your own. Thus, in order to win the war against neoliberal integration in North America, the pro-gressive opposition needs its own pro-gressive version of a just and sustain-able North American economy upon which to build a vision and politics that can represent the future, not just protect the past.

Clearly, to be politically effective, the alternative must evolve out of wide de-bate, dialogue, and discussion among the many people and institutions needed to make up a serious cross-border popular movement. One starting point for that discussion might be a set of common de-mands for a revision of NAFTA. The foundation for a common pro-gram already exists. It is strongest and most conscious among farmers and their organizations and political allies in Mexico. For several years they have been demanding that their government rene-gotiate the lethal concessions it made in the agriculture chapter of the agreement. Yet each time they demonstrate and agi-tate, they are told by their government that revision is impossible because Can-ada and the United States will not do it, a message reinforced by the statements from the U.S. and Canadian embassies in Mexico City. Mexican farmers cannot win their fight without strong allies in the United States and Canada. But the alliance must be based on mutual self-interest, not just a charitable impulse. Today there are constituencies in both the United States and Canada that would support a rene-gotiation of NAFTA in their own inter-est. The most important are the trade unions and environmental groups that want labor and environmental protec-tions. Polls show that a majority of citizens in all three countries favor such protections in trade agreements. Thus there is a solid basis for the organizing of companion and connected demands for NAFTA renegotiation. The pledge dur-ing the 2008 presidential primaries by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clin-ton (whose husband pushed the agree-ment through Congress) to renegotiate NAFTA – which was incorporated into the 2008 Democratic Party platform — reflects this popular pressure in the United States. NAFTA should be more than renegoti-ated; it should be replaced with a new

16 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

vision for a people-focused North Amer-ican economy. For starters, the debate needs to be connected to the issue of immigration and aimed at a more fun-damental change in the basic idea of the agreement. Here we can take some inspi-ration from the European Union. The European Union is a common mar-ket that allows for the free movement of workers across borders. When the treaty setting up the European Union was being debated, there was resistance and anxiety among the richer member countries that workers from the poorest nation—Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greec—would overrun their economies. So the European Union was constructed with a conscious “cohesion” policy. The wealthier countries provided loans and grants for infrastructure, industrial de-velopment, and other activities designed to close the gap between richer and poorer economies.

Despite the European Union’s continued struggles over a social charter, the basic policy was a resounding success. Unlike NAFTA, the poorer nations grew faster than the richer ones and the gap between them narrowed. In the case of Ireland, it disappeared. Most stunning of all is what did not occur—the feared mass migra-tion of the unemployed. As it turned out, when decent opportunities were created at home—even if the jobs were not as

lucrative as in the richer nations—people preferred to remain in their own country. So one aim of a new North American deal would be to provide for a similar fund for investment in Mexico in exchange for changes in Mexican law and institutions that would allow the income of Mexican workers to rise as their economy grows. These would include guarantees for free trade unions, enforceable minimum wag-es, and an increase in education and other social spending. The cost of such a cohe-sion fund would be about $100 billion, much of it in the form of loan guarantees rather than cash, not an insignificant sum but certainly affordable for a nation will-ing to waste $2–3 trillion on a hopeless war in Iraq. This overarching vision could include a bill of rights for citizens of North America, enforceable in all countries, which would reassert the primacy of civil protection of individuals and democratic government over the extraordinary privileges that NAFTA gives to corporate investors. It would also provide for a continental devel-opment strategy that shifts the economic policy objectives of all three countries from subsidizing pursuit of global profits by corporate investors to support of great-er self-sufficiency, resource conservation, and increased investment in health, edu-cation, and other social goals.

This is but a sketch of the kind of broad

vision that might—with debates, elabo-ration, and coordinated political work—appeal to majorities in all three countries in contrast to the reactionary agenda their corporate-financed-policy classes are pursuing. A cross-border movement with such a common program could build on the many organizational and personal relationships that already ex-ist. Early steps to gain experience and trust could include joint actions against corporate abuses that span the conti-nent. A simultaneous strike against a common employer or a protest against a common environmental abuse could dramatize the interests that people in all three countries share. Progressives could develop a common legislative agenda, introducing the same proposals in all three legislatures. Such a political project here in North America could reinforce beleaguered progressives in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia who are trying to bring to life regional models of devel-opment that respect human life and dignity. Finally, it could help undercut U.S. elites’ illusions of their moral right to rule the world—an imperial agenda to which elites in Mexico and Canada have given overt and covert support—and force a new generation of leaders to turn to the humbler but more produc-tive task of making their own part of the globe a better place.

a n o R T h a m e R i c a T h a T W o R k S f o R a l l i T S P e o P l e 1 7

NotesElizabeth Drew, On the Edge: the Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1994), 299.1.

The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Remarks by President Clinton, President Bush, President Carter President Ford and 2.

Vice President Gore in signing of NAFTA Side Agreements, Washington DC, September 14, 1993.

Ibid.3.

Ibid.4.

Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (New York: Wiley 2006), 37. 5.

Jeffrey Garten, “The Big Emerging Markets: Changing American Interests in the Global Economy,” remarks before the Foreign Policy 6.

Association, January 24, 1994.

Tina Rosenberg, “Why Mexico’s Small Corn Farmers Go Hungry,” New York Times, March 3, 2003.7.

Jorge Castañeda. The Mexican Shock (New York: New Press, 1995), 69.8.

“Conapo: la migracion hacia Estados Unidos continuará al menos 15 años,” La Jornada, November 25, 2007, 7.9.

Stephen J. Weber, “In Mexico, U.S. and Canada, Public Support for NAFTA Surprisingly Strong, Given Each Country Sees Grass 10.

as Greener on the Other Side,” WorldPublicOpinion.org, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brlatinamericara/161.

php?nid=&id=&pnt=161 (accessed August 13, 2008).

in 1982, when the peso crashed, the mexican gov-ernment bought banamex as a way of rescuing the bank and its mexican owners from bankruptcy. in 1991, mexican president carlos Salinas resold it for $4.6 billion to a business group headed by a close ally, Roberto hernández. Two years later, Salinas signed nafTa, which—although it was scarcely mentioned—included a timetable for dismantling mexico’s law against foreign ownership of its com-mercial banks. Robert Rubin, a former co-chair of goldman-Sachs, who had helped finance carlos Salinas’ privatization program, was the foremost champion of nafTa in the clinton White house. When another peso crisis hit mexico in the winter of 1994–95, Rubin, then U.S. treasury secretary, engineered a bailout with govern-ment subsidies of the Wall Street holders of mexican bonds. as part of the complex deal, Salinas’s suc-cessor, ernesto Zedillo, accelerated the opening of mexican banks to foreigners. at the same time, Ze-dillo subsidized a rescue of mexican banks by having his government buying the banks’ largely worthless portfolios of uncollectible loans on credit.

in 1999 Rubin resigned as treasury secretary to be-come chair of the executive committee of citigroup. Two years later, shortly after the date on which for-eigners could buy controlling interest in mexican banks, citigroup bought banamex for $12.5 billion plus a seat on the citigroup board for hernández. Re-cently hernández masterminded the citigroup tax-exempt purchase of aero méxico from the mexican government in part with the money from that gov-ernment’s continued subsidy of citigroup/banamex. ironically, as even carlos Salinas has admitted, the almost 100 percent foreign-owned mexican banking system has been even less responsive to the need for local business credit than it was under the old, inefficient mexican ownership. The bankers from new york and madrid are more interested in taking deposits out of mexico and investing abroad, and in making high-interest-rate loans to consumers to buy chinese imports, than making loans to develop mexican businesses.

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

18 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

The RighT To STay:

ReacTivaTe agRicUlTURe, ReTain The PoPUlaTion

aRmanDo baRTRa

Focusing on the impact of free-trade policies in the Mexican agricultural sector, Bartra expounds on the need to retain and enhance Mexican food and labor sovereignty to stem the “migration compulsion” gripping ru-ral farming communities. He outlines the shortcomings of government poverty-allevi-ation programs and the consequences of the migration exodus—including crippling la-bor shortages and remittance dependency—on Mexican agricultural production and peasant livelihoods. Advocating the “right to not emigrate,” Bartra calls for a new relationship between the Mexican govern-ment and agricultural producers based on renewed state commitment to rural social welfare and concrete actions to stimulate lo-cal economic development.

IntroductionGlobal and growing, migration from South to North and East to West is not a manageable population adjustment but rather an uncontrolled human flow. It is an uncontainable demographic tor-rent that speaks less of a virtuous balance between labor supply and demand, and more of plunder and brutal exclusion dramatized by legions of marginalized people in movement—an ailing yet hopeful army pursuing a mirage across rivers, oceans, and borders, and sow-ing the whole world with “aliens.” No neighborhood in the “developed” world is safe from the invasion of “southies” or “Orientals.” The remedy for this maddening twenty-first-century exodus is, at least in part, the recovery of food and la-bor sovereignty in sending countries through the revitalization of agricul-tural sectors and investment in peasant producers. The urgency is now greater than ever: as rising oil prices signal the end of cheap transportation and global demand for biofuels intensifies, basic

food-grain production is increasingly forced to the sideline.

1. The Ailment As tariff barriers have been dismantled to allow for free exchange of goods and services, walls have been built to prevent free movement of workers, criminaliz-ing migrant access to the labor markets of the developed world. The millions of undocumented workers in the United States are a disadvantaged army of sur-plus labor with low wages, poor working conditions, weak unionizing rights, and few if any social benefits. They represent a cheap, vulnerable workforce, willing to take the worst jobs and work to the bone. Economically profitable for employers, labor illegality is socially disruptive.

Migratory Mexico We are an abandoned and in-transit country, the world champions of exo-dus. No country is emptying as quickly as Mexico. Nearly thirty million Mexi-cans now live on the other side of the border, of which less than half were born in Mexico and perhaps one half of that are undocumented. A country with a shattered present and uncertain future means an uprooted and transient nation. Mexicans are a binational peo-ple. The symbiosis with our northern neighbor is also evident in substantial and growing economic flows. Remit-tances, the money sent home by mi-grants, reached $25 billion in 2007—an amount three times the value of agri-cultural exports, much higher than an-nual tourism revenue, larger than total foreign direct investment, and second only to oil exports. These remittances greatly exceed federal expenditures on rural programs such as Alianza para el Campo and Procampo, even after tak-ing into account the Ministry of Agri-culture’s operating costs.

Migrants have always existed but today they form a legion, a legion that coin-cides with the introduction of “structural adjustment” programs and the launch of NAFTA in 1994. The policies that were supposed to carry the country into the First World, have instead forced Mexi-cans into the United States. The inter-national treaties that were supposed to deliver us from underdevelopment have instead made us flounder in crisis and exodus. Paradoxically, NAFTA hardly touches on migration issues. The failure of NAFTA speaks to the discrimination of “human merchandise” and debunks the hypothesis that commercial liberal-ization will stimulate Mexican economic growth and job creation, thereby decreas-ing out-migration and improving wages and working conditions in the receiving country’s labor markets. The remedy turned out to be worse than the ailment. Trade liberalization un-der extreme asymmetries has destroyed the Mexican economy. It has killed off small- and medium-sized businesses that serve the domestic market and provide jobs, and wiped out peasant agriculture that feeds nearly a quarter of the pop-ulation—in particular, the producers of basic grains on which the country’s food security depends. The wholesale dismantling of Mexico’s productive in-frastructure has generated a growing and uncontrollable exodus.

The “Demographic Bonus” Mexico’s central bank began measur-ing remittance flows in 1995. In 2004, it recorded fifty-one million transac-tions worth an average of $327 each, approximately $16 billion. However, this figure includes only recorded transac-tions; we must still account for the value of funds sent through friends and family members, as well as merchandise sent as

T h e R i g h T T o S T a y 1 9

Former Mexican Agriculture Minister and Golf Enthusiast, Javier Usabiaga. Photo by Rocha, courtesy of La Jornada.

remittance amounts are severely overesti-mated and the figure should be halved. The difference between these calcula-tions is dramatic but the problem is not so much with the magnitude of the re-mittances as with the recipients them-selves. Here discrepancies fade away: “Remittances are a complement to or a substitute for wages and not investment capital,” concluded an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study in 2005.3 Reiterating its position, the IMF states, “Remittances can be identified not as capital for economic growth, but rather as compensation for poor economic performance.” Therefore, although remittances represent over half of the

gifts. Citing a study by the University of California, Rafael Alarcon, an academic at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, states that “nearly a third of remittances are sent through relatives and friends.”1 If this is true, remittances are grossly un-derestimated and the amount should be approximately 30 percent higher. Jose Santibañez Romellón, president of the same academic institution, also considers the central bank’s figure “questionable”—besides remittances, it includes other types of transactions, including “illicit ones,” making “the amount that actually reaches homes slightly more than half that reported by the bank.”2 If this analysis is correct,

cumulative foreign direct investment be-tween 1994 and 2003, they simply com-pensate for the current deficit, sustain the value of the peso, and stimulate the domestic consumer goods market. Although Mexico’s population is predom-inately young today, in twenty or twenty-five years it will be mostly old. There are currently over eight million people aged sixty and older, making up 7.7 percent of the population. By the middle of the century, there will be thirty-six million senior citizens—28 percent of the total population. The central problem is that the majority of Mexicans reaching work-ing age over the last two decades have not joined the labor market; rather, they

20 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

to $17 billion, approximately 9 percent. Furthermore, these figures refer only to the sector where most remittances origi-nate, and do not include mixed-origin families or Mexican-American families. If these groups were included, the in-come of Mexican migrants would rise to over $400 billion. Compared with these figures, remittanc-es are pocket change. They are less still if we consider that the $187 billion or $400 billion earned by migrants is largely wages or self-generated income. That is, we must still account for employers’ prof-its, large figures which depend on capital stock and a capital earnings rate—factors that increase as wages are driven down by the presence of migrants in the U.S. labor market. The value added accrues to the U.S., not the Mexican, economy. The destruction of the great reservoir of subsistence productivity that was the Mexican countryside and the disman-tling of the small- and medium-sized en-terprises that provided employment has caused a perverse positive feedback loop. The young and more skilled labor force emigrates to the United States, where productivity and wages are higher. Conse-quently, the income generated by youths born, raised, and educated in Mexico does not serve to increase the country’s wealth and productive capacity but rather those of our neighbor, deepening asymmetries that ultimately drive the exodus.

The Need for Strong Arms When indigenous peoples and peasants migrate, they greatly diminish labor availability in the countryside, driving up relative wages. The problem deepens when remittances start arriving. Coupled with resources from “human capital de-velopment” government programs like Progresa (which really only prepares fu-ture migrants), remittances raise the cost of labor even more. These transfers sustain subsistence livelihoods, however precariously, and place local wages in competition with the diaspora’s dollars and the government’s subsidies.

have remained unemployed, entered the underground crime economy, or been forced to leave the country. A Banamex-Citigroup study established that while 80 percent of Mexicans resid-ing in the United States are between fif-teen and fifty-five years of age, only 55 percent of the population falls within this age group in Mexico. The disparity is even starker if we focus on young adults: 30 percent of migrants are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, while in Mex-ico only 15 percent of the population is within this age range. This shows that the percentage of young adults in the diaspora is double that in the home country. If it is worrisome that, for lack of a better future, one in eleven Mexicans lives in the United States, it is downright alarming that one in six young adults is already on the other side of the border, while a large number of those that remain in Mexico are desperate-ly trying to leave. The end of the migra-tory compulsion is nowhere in sight: since current economic policies cannot sustain economic growth and satisfy the demand for new jobs—much less make up for the cumulative deficit—the pressure on the labor market will remain at current levels for another decade. Citing a recent study, Isabel Guerrero, World Bank director for Mexico and Co-lombia, explains that the reduction in ru-ral poverty since 2000 is primarily due to “the increase in direct transfers”—both public, such as the Oportunidades pro-gram, and private, mainly remittances.4

This means that the increased income of the poorest sectors of the population is due to transfers, rather than an increase in productivity or improved terms of trade. While the value of remittances is undeniably high, they represent a very small share of the wealth generated by Mexican workers in the United States. According to Rodolfo Tuirán, “90% of the income [of Mexicans in the United States] remains in that country, and only 10% is sent back to Mexico.”5 Tuirán adds that Mexican migrants earned some $187 billion in 2004 and sent back close

“How many more? Already more than 2,000.” Painted on a cross on the Mexican side of the border in Sasabe, Sonora. Photo by John Gibler.

T h e R i g h T T o S T a y 2 1

peasants are substituting the dollar har-vest for the corn harvest,” concludes Daniel Villafuerte, a professor at the Chiapas Science and Arts University. The situation became critical in late 2007: “The coffee sector crisis in Chiapas is taking a turn for the worse because of the labor shortage. Day workers—including Guatemalans—are reluctant to come work due to low salaries. Chiapas is the top coffee producer in Mexico . . . but the sector’s current situation is very wor-rying. . . . Thousands of local workers, including the owners of croplands, have emigrated to the United States leaving many communities with only women, children, and the elderly.”8

by migratory youth and the Oportu-nidades money the government gives away for having lots of kids, nobody here wants to work. We’re better off cutting down the plantation.”6 And so it goes elsewhere. In Veracruz state, “bad weather, abandonment of fields because of migration, and the ever-decreasing availability of laborers will cause a drastic drop in production, a drop of fifty percent.”7 In the mid-1990s, very few Chiapanecos left for the United States. Today, around thirty thousand people leave every year, most of whom are indigenous. “Chiapas

Coffee production is an example of the grave imbalances created by labor market shortages. The crop is mostly marketed internationally, and small growers, each managing more than half a million holdings of less than ten hectares (approximately 24.7 acres), predominate. In addition to recurring drops in producer prices, peasants now have to deal with the shortage of labor-ers willing to pick it. In 2004—despite the fact that international prices for the crop were high that year—a Oaxacan coffee grower stated, “Coffee growing is very laborious. My wife and I cannot handle it all, but there are no workers here. Between the greenbacks sent back

“The border is so large because we are on our knees.” Painted on the Mexican side of the border wall, directly in front of the Sonora State Migrant Support Office in Nogales, Sonora. Photo by John Gibler.

22 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

parents’ living conditions and could hope for further improvement for their offspring. This conviction was lost in the 1980s when technocratic policies re-duced options for progress by rejecting welfare state provisions and betting on a neoliberal model that cared only about exports. By giving up on the internal market, this model also got rid of any redistributive policies.

Susan Gzesh, director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chi-cago, reminds, “Any durable ‘solution’ to the massive Mexican exodus to the United State should include . . . mea-sures that provide . . . those not wishing to migrate the means to remain in their

Migrants’ Rights and the Right to Not Emigrate I do not want to condemn migration, which is a right, but the “right to leave” becomes a compulsion when its sym-metrical guarantee, the “right to stay,” does not exist. The “right to stay” implies the existence of the material and spiritual conditions necessary to make staying an option, not a curse. This right is absent when there is no security, when there are no liberties, jobs, dignified income, or hopeful future. Globalization’s great-est gift to rank-and-file “peripheries” has been to snuff their expectations of a bright future. After the 1910 revolu-tion, each new generation of Mexicans could see some improvement over their

2. The Remedy Travels are enlightening but when migration is the result of a social ca-tastrophe, it is impossible to normal-ize or dignify. While the pain can be attenuated, the real solution lies in attacking the causes of the exodus, not just its symptoms. Despite being very important, the issue of migrants’ rights does not go to the root cause of the human avalanche: the destruction of peripheral societies’ economies. In the new era of globalization, na-tions have lost the last tatters of food and labor security. Countries such as Mexico are incapable of meeting their population’s basic food and employ-ment needs.

The Mixteca region of Oaxaca is one of the poorest areas in Mexico. Indigenous Mixtec, Triqui and other groups from this region now make up a large percentage of the migrants who have left to work in the United States. But many people try to stay on the land and farm, despite the difficulty. Zacarias Salazar plows his cornfield behind oxen, in the traditional... Photo by David Bacon.

T h e R i g h T T o S T a y 2 3

country. Some groups advocating for hu-man rights are starting to focus on ‘the right not to emigrate.’”9 This right must be guaranteed by the state. The Mexican Constitution’s Article 27 asserts that “the State will foster the conditions for inte-gral rural development, with the purpose of creating jobs and guaranteeing the peasant population’s welfare.” Article 123 is even more explicit: “Every person has the right to dignified and socially use-ful work; to that effect, job creation and social organization for Labor will be pro-moted, under the guidelines established by the Law.” However, since the rest of the article deals only with relations be-tween employers and workers, a bylaw is needed to guarantee the right to work. Just as the Mexican Lower Chamber passed the Food and Nutrition Security and Sovereignty Planning Law in 2006, a similar law for labor security and sov-ereignty should be passed. It should include the principles of “democratic planning” and “directorship of develop-ment” that the Constitution bestows on the state. Also, it should define criteria, strategies, and instruments to make it in-clusive and egalitarian. It should guaran-tee a “dignified and socially useful job,” a right currently unavailable to both the half million Mexicans that move to the United States every year and the equal number who annually sink into the un-derground economy. The free market does not provide food and employment. If we want food and employment security, we need sover-eignty in food and labor matters and consistent government action in de-fense of our social welfare. Food sov-ereignty should be understood as the nation’s capacity to foster sustainable production of grains and other basic crops, as well as the population’s capac-ity to earn sufficient income to pur-chase those goods. Labor sovereignty should be understood as the capacity to sponsor the creation of sufficient digni-fied jobs to ensure economic stability for the population.

I do not propose autarchy. The EU is the prime modern example of how countries can mutually benefit from associations that cede some degree of sovereignty. I also do not propose food and labor self-sufficiency. It is not in-admissible to import some foodstuffs and to say goodbye to some migrants; what is inadmissible is to critically weaken nations by creating absolute food and labor dependency.

3. End of an Era Revaluing the countryside demands a new rural-urban pact, and within this framework, a new relationship between the state and small rural producers. The peasant movement has been asking for this since at least the 1995 protest marches, a year after the implementation of NAFTA. The movement vindicated its demands in 2003, then under the guise of the Countryside Cannot Take it Any-more movement, when the govern-ment signed the National Accord for the Countryside. These demands are heard but not answered; the pacts are signed but not honored. The political class is convinced that agriculture must blindly submit to “market signals,” and that peasants do not have a place in the export agribusiness model. After World War II, agricultural prices started a long decline. Food prices have dropped 75 percent in the last thirty years. This decline is due less to new land being farmed—indeed large tracts were subsidized out of production—and more to greater productivity resulting from Green Revolution technologies that granted producers relative indepen-dence from agro-ecological conditions. In addition to the explosive increase in irrigation, there was widespread mechani-zation, introduction of improved seeds, a steep hike in the use of chemical fertiliz-ers, new herbicides, and a broad range of pesticides. These developments, along with subsidies, turned the metropolitan coun-tries into the world’s granary, relegating pe-

ripheral countries to the role of agricultural raw material suppliers and food importers.

This state of matters has ended. The Economist’s food-price index is at its highest point since its measurement started in 1845, and cereal stocks, as a share of total production, are the low-est in record. At the end of 2007, wheat reached $400 per ton, the highest price in memory, and corn hit $175 per ton, a new record. The end of cheap food is inseparable from the end of cheap fuels. These high prices mark the close of a historical cycle of capitalist expansion that began some two hundred years ago, an economic order sustained by growing energy consumption (more energy has been used in the last twenty years than in all previous human history) that was only possible thanks to high-density fos-sil fuels. The impact of oil, gas, and coal

Former Mexican Agriculture Minister and Golf Enthusiast, Javier Usabiaga.Illustration by Rocha,

courtesy of La Jornada.

24 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

combustion on a massive scale is lead-ing us to an irreversible environmental crisis. As the use of these fuels declines, the associated historical development model will come to a close; its energy characteristics are so unusual that we are unlikely to see anything like them again.10

With the exhaustion of oil reserves, a socially destructive and environmentally predatory paradigm of civilization, char-acterized by unsustainable energy con-sumption, will run out of steam. The alternative to this seeming dead end lies not in the development of new energy sources designed to maintain current levels of consumption, but rather radi-cally rethinking and transforming our systems of production, marketing, and consumption. The world needs more food but it can-not produce it the way it used to. With high prices, low stocks, rising trans-

portation costs, progressive diversion of agricultural lands to other uses, and intensifying global warming effects on crops, depending on basic grain imports is ruinous for countries that can afford them and suicidal for those that cannot. In the future, recovering food security and sovereignty to ensure self-sufficien-cy, at least in the most highly consumed goods, will be not only socially and politically pertinent, but also economi-cally profitable from the perspective of national accounts.

However, how and by whom can the foods needed by each country be pro-duced? The answer is not agribusiness for two reasons. First, its technologi-cal model is predatory. Agricultural expansion using this model will have incalculable environmental damage. Second, its economic rationality is speculative. It will maximize profits by cultivating ever farther and less fertile land.

Leaving the provision of foodstuffs in private hands in times of crisis facilitates extractive agriculture’s final strike against peasants and indigenous communities. Besides not creating jobs, agribusiness degrades soils, water, and biodiversity, and favors mining-style land cultivation that has already shown its limitations. By monopolizing the means of produc-tion, patented seed, and the marketing system, agribusiness controls supply. Since demand for basic foodstuffs is inelastic, prices have no limits besides corporate voracity and the starving con-sumer’s willingness to pay. Excess profit is appropriated not by local agents, but by transnational grain companies—businesspeople who, unconcerned with countryside welfare, want to make the most money in the shortest time while establishing a predatory agricultural model that forfeits agricultural jobs. The local, national, and global alter-native is collective peasant-household production, operating within an institu-tional framework that enhances social, environmental, technological, and eco-nomic virtues. Household production can increase agricultural supply as it has done historically. Nevertheless, if it lacks public support and confronts an un-regulated economic environment, it will end up selling at cost or below; exhaust-ing its natural and productive resources, instead of conserving and increasing them. If agribusiness extracts excessive profits from society, peasant agriculture pays the price and its long-term viabil-ity is compromised. What we need is a new agreement between rural and urban worlds in which cities recognize and re-munerate the real contributions of a so-cially just, environmentally sustainable, economically efficient countryside. This effort must be embodied in public poli-cies that give technical and economic viability to socially and environmen-tally necessary food production, govern-ment actions that decisively intervene in the agricultural market to revitalize the rural world through regulation and compensatory policies.

An unemployed woman and man sit in the shade waiting to sell pumpkin seeds to unlikely visitors. The church in the back ground was built using migrants’ remittances through the

federal “three-for-one” program. Photo by John Gibler.

T h e R i g h T T o S T a y 2 5

In its 2008 World Development Report agriculture section, the World Bank ac-knowledges that “it is necessary to make this sector the center of development programs”—3 billion of the 5.5 billion inhabitants of developing countries live in the countryside, making “a revolu-tion in the productivity of small rural producers” necessary. This recognition is welcome. However, to make such a productivity revolution effective, these countries will need to revitalize their peasant economies. Revitalization de-pends on two preconditions: the estab-lishment of food sovereignty through a reallocation of basic foodstuff pro-duction to reduce the energy waste of the global agricultural export industry that privileges global markets over lo-cal ones, and the establishment of labor sovereignty to reduce the economic cost and cultural and social erosion driving forced migration.

Changing directions will not be easy but successful experiences point in the right direction. The state of Zacatecas, with half its population living as mi-grants, is an emblem of the exodus. It is also a laboratory for alternative uses of remittances. Under the 3 x 1 Program—which offers federal, state, and munici-pal matching funds on a dollar per dollar basis—over two thousand development projects have been launched between 1993 and 2007.11

The Zapotec towns of Santa María Guienagati and Santiago Lachiguiri, Oaxaca, members of the Union of In-digenous Communities of the Isthmus Region (UCIRI), are precursors of or-ganic coffee production. Both have been exporting to the European Fair Trade Market, which they helped to create in 1988. Despite this, their inhabitants have not escaped the migratory com-

pulsion. In 2003, the towns officially registered three thousand hectares of woodland as Protected Community Area for conservation and sustainable development. They are now developing ecotourism projects on this land, and their words synthesize the argument of this essay: “Youth have already caught the migration bug. . . . Between remit-tances and the money the government passes around . . . there are fewer and fewer people willing to work. However, in Lachiguiri and Guienagati, we are de-termined to resist. For example, instead of running to the United States to earn famous dollars working for gringos, it is better if the güeros come here to vaca-tion at the Cerro de las Flores. That way, instead of us having to go suffer in those places, they themselves will bring the greenbacks. Besides, we will treat them better here than they would ever treat us over there.”12

Notes Juan Balboa. “Transferencia de Bolsillo y Clubes Migrantes,” 1. La Jornada, September 6, 2004.

Jose Santibáñez Romellón, “Los Mitos de las Remesas,” 2. La Jornada, June 13, 2005.

Paola Giuliano and Marta Ruiz-Arranz, “Remittances, Financial Development, and Growth,” Working Paper No. 05/234, Interna-3.

tional Monetary Fund, 2005.

Roberto González Amador and Rosa E. Vargas, “Baja Pobreza Rural, Pero Crece Desigualdad,”4. La Jornada, August 25, 2005.

Alma E. Muñoz, “Los Migrantes Destinan a Remesas Casi 10% de Sus Ingresos Anuales,” 5. La Jornada, June 18, 2005.

A. Bartra, R., Cobo and L. Paz Paredes, 6. Cafetales Campesinos (Instituto Maya, 2005).

Andrés T. Morales. “Prevén Desplome de la Caficultura en Veracruz,” 7. La Jornada. December 7, 2007.

Rodolfo Villalba. “Chiapas: Falta de Nano de Obra Agrava Crisis en la Caficultura,” 8. La Jornada, December 29, 2007.

Susan Gzesh, “Derechos Humanos y Migración: Una Mirada desde Estados Unidos,” 9. La Jornada del Campo, February 12, 2008.

See Jack Santa Bárbara, “The False Promise of Biofuels,” International Forum on Globalization and Institute for Policy Studies, 2007.10.

Rodolfo García Zamora, “Zacatecas: Emblema de la Migración,” 11. La Jornada del Campo, February 12, 2008.

Rosario Cobo and Armando Bartra 12. Puerta del Viento, Cerro de las Flores, Área Comunitaria Protegida (México: UCIRI, 2007).

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

26 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

eqUaliTy anD hUman RighTS, inSTeaD of DiSPlacemenT anD

cRiminaliZaTion

by DaviD bacon

Detailing the economic displacement of Mexican agricultural and manufacturing workers produced by NAFTA and precur-sory privatization and economic restruc-turing, Bacon frames trade and immigra-tion policy as two parts of a single system. He argues that U.S. free-trade agreements with countries of unequal economic strength have become a mechanism to produce workers, while guest worker and employment-based immigration policies are designed to act as an unacknowledged labor supply system for U.S. industries. Highlighting the inherent contradiction between current trade and immigration policies, Bacon asserts that trade policy reform is as important to solving the im-migration crisis as granting legal status, rights, and benefits to undocumented workers, and calls for the unlinking of im-migration status and employment.

Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and other economic reforms are now uprooting and displacing Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived from Spain. While California farmworkers twenty and thirty years ago came from parts of Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from indigenous communities in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero.

Rufino Dominguez, former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, says there are about five hundred thousand indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the United States, three hundred thousand in California alone. “There are no jobs, and NAFTA drove the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore,” he says. “We come to the United States to work because there’s no alternative.”

As he points out, U.S. trade and immi-gration policy are part of a single system, and the negotiation of NAFTA was an important step in the development of this relationship.

Since NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the Congress has debated and passed sev-eral new trade agreements—with Peru, Jordan, Chile, as well as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time it has debated immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of dis-placed people migrating to the United States, looking for work. Meanwhile, a rising tide of anti-immigrant hyste-ria has increasingly demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any pretense of equality with people living in the com-munities around them. To resolve any of these dilemmas, from adopting ratio-nal and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility toward migrants, the starting point must be an examination of the way U.S. poli-cies have both produced migration and criminalized migrants.

Trade negotiations and immigration pol-icy were formally joined together when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986. While most attention has focused on its provi-sions for amnesty and employer sanc-tions, few noted one other provision of the law. IRCA set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to study the causes of immigration to the United States. The commission was inac-tive until 1988 but began holding hear-ings when the United States and Canada signed a bilateral free-trade agreement. After Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari made it plain that he favored

a similar agreement with Mexico, the commission made a report to President George H. W. Bush and to Congress in 1990. It found, unsurprisingly, that the main motivation for coming to the Unit-ed States was economic.

To slow or halt this flow, it recommended “promoting greater economic integration between the migrant sending countries and the United States through free trade” and that “U.S. economic policy should promote a system of open trade.” It con-cluded that “the United States should expedite the development of a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and encourage its incorporation with Canada into a North American free trade area,” while warning that “it takes many years—even genera-tions—for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect.”

The negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months of the report. As Congress debated the treaty, President Salinas toured the United States, telling audiences unhappy at high levels of im-migration that passing NAFTA would reduce it by providing employment for Mexicans in Mexico. Back home Salinas and other treaty proponents made the same argument. NAFTA, they claimed, would set Mexico on a course to become a First World nation. “We did become part of the first world,” says Juan Manuel Sandoval, coordinator of the Permanent Seminar on Chicano and Border Studies at Mexico City’s National Institute of An-thropology and History. “The backyard.”

NAFTA instead became an impor-tant source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate. The treaty forced yellow corn grown by Mexican farmers without sub-sidies to compete in Mexico’s own mar-ket with corn from huge U.S. producers, subsidized by the United States farm bill.

e q U a l i T y a n D h U m a n R i g h T S 2 7

Deported migrants cross back into Mexico at the bor-der between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora.

Photo by John Gibler.

Agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion annually—$2.5 bil-lion in 2006 in corn alone. In January and February of 2008, huge demon-strations in Mexico sought to block the implementation of the agreement’s final chapter, which lowered the tariff barriers on white corn and beans.

As a result of a growing crisis in agricul-tural production, by the 1980s Mexico had already become a corn importer and, according to Sandoval, large farmers switched to other crops when they could not compete with U.S. grain dump-ing. But NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it im-possible to sell corn or other farm prod-ucts for what it cost to produce them. The CONASUPO system (Compañía Nacional de Subsistencias Populares), in which the government bought corn at subsidized prices, turned it into tortillas and sold them in state-franchised grocery stores at subsidized low prices, was abol-ished. And when NAFTA pulled down customs barriers, large U.S. corporations dumped even more agricultural products on the Mexican market. Rural families went hungry when they could not find buyers for what they had grown.

Mexico could not protect its own ag-riculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped govern-ment might have bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat or provided subsidies for other crops. But once free-market strictures were in place prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Veracruz campesinos joined the stream of workers headed north.

Poor people in Mexican cities fared no better. Although a flood of cheap U.S. grain was supposed to make consumer prices fall, the opposite occurred. With the end of the CONASUPO stores and price controls, the price of tortillas more than doubled in the years that followed NAFTA’s adoption. One company, Grupo Maseca, monopolized tortilla production, while Wal-Mart became Mexico’s largest retailer.

Under Mexico’s former national con-tent laws, foreign auto makers like Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and Volkswa-gen were required to buy some of their components from Mexican producers. Workers labored in the parts plants that produced them. NAFTA, however, pro-hibited laws requiring foreign producers to use a certain percentage of local content in assembled products. Without this re-straint, the auto giants began to supply their assembly lines with parts from their own subsidiaries, often manufactured in other countries. Mexican parts workers lost their jobs by the thousands.

NAFTA was part of a process that began long before, in which economic reforms restructured the Mexican economy. One major objective of those reforms was the privatization of the large state sector, em-ploying millions of workers. By the early 1990s, Mexico had sold not just its mines to one company, Grupo Mexico, owned by the Larreas family, but its steel mill in Michoacan to the Villareals, and its tele-phone company to Carlos Slim. Former Mexico City mayor Carlos Hanks drove the city’s bus system deeply into debt and then bought the lines in the 1990s at public auction.

Rich Mexicans were not the only benefi-ciaries of privatization. U.S. companies were allowed to own land and factories,

eventually anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners. U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the Larreas, became the owner of the country’s main North–South rail line, and immedi-ately discontinued virtually all passenger service, as railroad corporations had done in the United States. As the Lar-reas and Union Pacific moved to boost profits and cut labor costs, Mexican rail employment dropped from over 90,000 to 36,000. The railroad union under left-

28 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

produced shrank during U.S. reces-sions. In 2000–01, four hundred thou-sand jobs were lost on the U.S.-Mexico border, and in the current recession thousands more will be eliminated.

All of these policies produce displaced people who can no longer make a living or survive as they have done before. The rosy predictions of NAFTA’s boosters that it would slow migration proved false. Be-tween just 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost nine hundred thousand jobs in the coun-tryside, and seven hundred thousand in the cities. Since 1994, six million Mexi-cans came to live in the United States. Another million went to work in the ma-quiladoras. In just five years, from 2000 to 2005, the Mexican population living in the United States increased from ten to twelve million. With few green cards or permanent residence visas available for Mexicans, most of these migrants were undocumented.

People were migrating from Mexico to the United States long before NAFTA was negotiated. Juan Manuel Sandoval emphasizes that “Mexican labor has al-ways been linked to the different stages of U.S. capitalist development since the 19th century—in times of prosperity, by the incorporation of big numbers of workers in agricultural, manufacturing, service and other sectors, and in periods of economic crisis, by the deportation of Mexican laborers back to Mexico in huge numbers.” But from 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive economic reforms produced more migrants. Ejidatarios who lost their land found jobs as farm workers in California. Laid-off railroad workers traveled north, as their forbears had dur-ing the early 1900s, when Mexican labor built much of the rail network through the U.S. Southwest. The displacement of people had already grown so large by 1986 that the commission established by IRCA was charged with recommending measures to halt or slow it.

Its report urged that “migrant-sending countries should encourage technological

Vasquez, an activist with the Frente In-dígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB) in Fresno, California, says, “The lack of human rights itself is a factor con-tributing to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, since it closes off our ability to call for any change.

In NAFTA’s first year, one million Mexi-cans lost their jobs when the peso was de-valued. To avert the sell-off of short-term bonds and a flood of capital to the north, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to Mexico, which was paid to bondholders, mostly U.S. banks. In return, Mexico had to pledge its oil revenue to pay off foreign debt, making the country’s primary source of income unavailable for social needs, and foreign capital took control of the Mexican banking system.

As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquiladora industry, be-came increasingly tied to the U.S. mar-ket, Mexican workers lost jobs when the market for what those factories

wing leaders Demetrio Vallejo and Val-entin Campa had been so strong that its strikes challenged the government in the 1950s. The two spent years in prison for their temerity. Facing privatization, rail-road workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their jobs, but they lost and their union became a shadow of its for-mer presence in Mexican politics.

After NAFTA the privatization wave ex-panded. Mexico’s ports were sold off and companies like Stevedoring Services of America, Hutchinson, and TMM now operate the country’s largest shipping terminals. The impact on longshoring wages was devastating. In Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas, the two largest Pacific coast ports, crane drivers made $100–160 per day before privatization in the late 1980s. Today they make $40–50. In 2006, spreading poverty and the lack of a program to create jobs and raise liv-ing standards ignited months of conflict in Oaxaca, in which strikes and dem-onstrations were met with repression by an unpopular government. Leoncio

San Diego, CA. Expensive homes in a new development overlook the “La Gallinita” camp, made by indigenous Mixtec and Zapotec farm workers from Oaxaca, on a hillside outside Oceanside. Photo by David Bacon.

e q U a l i T y a n D h U m a n R i g h T S 2 9

Immigration policy determines the rules under which that labor is put to use. President George Bush says that the pur-pose of U.S. immigration policy should be to “connect willing employers and willing employees.” He is simply re-stating what has been true throughout U.S. history. U.S. immigration policy does not stop people from coming into the country, nor is it intended to. Its main function is to determine the sta-tus of people once they are here. And an

is intensive in capital, which is the American economy. One economy is intensive in labor, which is the Mexican economy. We are two complementary economies, and that phenomenon is im-possible to stop.” When Calderón says “intensive in labor,” he means that mil-lions of Mexican citizens are being dis-placed, and that the country’s economy cannot produce employment for them. To Calderón and employers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, migra-tion is therefore a labor supply system.

modernization by strengthening and as-suring intellectual property protection and by removing existing impediments to investment” and recommended that “the United States should condition bi-lateral aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps toward struc-tural adjustment. Similarly, U.S. support for non-project lending by the interna-tional financial institutions should be based on the implementation of satisfac-tory adjustment programs.” The IRCA commission report even acknowledged the potential for harm by noting that “ef-forts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering.” NAFTA, however, was not intended to relieve human suffering. “It is the financial crashes and the economic di-sasters that drive people to work for dollars in the United States, to replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their family at home together,” says Harvard historian John Womack. “The debt-induced crash in the 1980s, before NAFTA, drove people north. . . . The financial crash and the Rubin-induced reform of NAFTA, New York’s financial expropriation of Mexican fi-nances between 1995 and 2000, drove the economically wrecked, dispossessed and impoverished north again.” Displacement is an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse. But not one immigration proposal in Congress in 2006 and 2007 tried to come to grips with the policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters, and farmers, in spite of the fact that legislators voted for these policies. In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were intro-duced, each of which would cause more displacement and more migration.

Today displacement and inequality are deeply ingrained in the free-market econ-omy. Mexican president Felipe Calderón said during a recent visit to California, “You have two economies. One economy

On May Day immigrants and their supporters filled the streets of Los Angeles twice in one day -- a huge march downtown, and another through the Wilshire district’s Miracle Mile. There were so many people that those participating said they were sin numero -- uncountable. Marchers of

all races and nationalities protested the bills in Congress that would criminalize...Photo by David Bacon.

30 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

California fields, and New York office buildings.

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox boasted that in 2005 his country’s citi-zens working in the United States sent back $18 billion. Some estimate that in 2006 that figure reached $25 billion. At the same time, the public funds that have historically paid for schools and public works increasingly leave Mexico in debt to foreign banks. Remittances, as large as they are, cannot make up for this outflow. According to a report to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, remit-tances accounted for an average of 1.19 percent of the gross domestic product be-tween 1996 and 2000, and 2.14 percent between 2001 and 2006. Debt payments accounted for 3 percent annually. By

produced them. Instead, the producers themselves are called illegal.

Companies depend not just on the work-ers in the factories and fields but also on the communities from which they come. If those communities stop send-ing workers, the labor supply dries up. Work stops. Yet no company pays for a single school or clinic, or even any taxes, in those communities. In the tiny Mexican towns that now provide workers, free-market and free-trade policies exert pressure to cut the government budget for social services. The cost of these services is now borne by workers themselves, in the form of remittance payments sent back from jobs in Nebraska slaughterhouses,

immigration policy based on providing a labor supply produces two effects. Dis-placement becomes an unspoken tool for producing workers, while inequality becomes official policy. Some twenty-four million immigrants live in the United States as either citi-zens or with documents, and twelve million without them. If migrants ac-tually did go home, whole industries would collapse. And employers benefit from large numbers of undocumented people, since illegality creates an inex-pensive system. So-called “illegal” work-ers produce wealth but receive a smaller share in return—a source of profit for those who employ them. No one claims that these excess profits are “illegal” and should be returned to those who

Mixtec men from Etla, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico, wait for work early in the morning. They live in the Los Peñasquitos canyon on the north edge of San Diego, and work as day laborers and farm workers — wherever they can find work. Photo by David Bacon.

e q U a l i T y a n D h U m a n R i g h T S 3 1

partially meeting unmet and unfunded social needs, remittances are indirectly subsidizing banks.

At the same time, companies dependent on this immigrant stream gain greater flexibility in adjusting for the highs and lows of market demand. The global production system has grown very flexible in accommodating economic booms and busts. Its employment sys-tem is based on the use of contractors, which is replacing the system in which workers were directly employed by the businesses using their labor. Displaced migrant workers are the backbone of this system. Its guiding principle is that immigration policy and enforce-ment should direct immigrants to in-dustries when their labor is needed and remove them when it is not. Guest-worker and employment-based visa programs were created to accom-modate these labor needs. When de-mand is high, employers recruit work-ers. When demand falls, those workers not only have to leave their jobs but the country entirely. Today employers and the Department of Homeland Secu-rity call for relaxing the requirements on guest-worker visas. Although there are minimum-wage and housing re-quirements, the Southern Poverty Law Center report “Close to Slavery” docu-ments the fact that the requirements are generally ignored. “These workers don’t have labor rights or benefits,” Dominguez charges. “It’s like slavery. If workers don’t get paid or they’re cheat-ed, they can’t do anything.” New guest-worker programs are the heart of the corporate program for U.S. immigration reform and are combined with proposals for increased enforce-ment and a pro-employer program for legalization of the undocumented. Proposals based on this three-part com-promise are called “comprehensive im-migration reform.”

“The governments of both Mexico and the United States are dependent on the cheap labor of Mexicans. They don’t say so openly, but they are,” Dominguez concludes. “What would improve our situation is real legal status for the peo-ple already here, and greater availability of visas based on family reunification. Legalization and more visas would re-solve a lot of problems—not all, but it would be a big step,” he says. “Walls won’t stop migration, but decent wages and investing money in creating jobs in our countries of origin would decrease the pressure forcing us to leave home. Penalizing us by making it illegal for us to work won’t stop migration, since it doesn’t deal with why people come.” Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliberal reforms is as cen-tral to immigration reform as gaining legal status for undocumented immi-grants. It makes no sense to promote more free-trade agreements and then condemn the migration of the people they displace. Instead Congress must end the use of the free-trade system as a mechanism for producing displaced workers. That also means unlinking im-migration status and employment. If employers are allowed to recruit contract labor abroad and those workers can only stay if they are continuously employed, they will never have enforceable rights. The root problem with migration in the global economy is that it is forced mi-gration. A coalition for reform should fight for the right of people to choose when and how to migrate, including the derecho de no migrar (the right not to migrate—the right for an alternative to migration). At the same time, migrants should have basic rights regardless of immigration status. “Otherwise,” Dominguez says, “wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, since if one employer has an advantage, others will seek the same

thing.” To raise the low cost of immi-grant labor, immigrant workers have to be able to organize. Permanent legal sta-tus makes it easier and less risky to orga-nize. Guest worker programs, employer sanctions, enforcement, and raids make organizing much more difficult.

Corporations and those who benefit from current priorities might not sup-port a more pro-migrant alternative but millions of people would. Whether they live in Mexico or the United States, working people need the same things—secure jobs at a living wage, rights in their workplaces and communities, and the freedom to travel and seek a future for their families.

“We have a problem. In order to build the anti-immigrant fence, we need to hire thousands of illegal

workers.” Cartoon by Fisgon, courtesy of La Jornada.

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32 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTionRegeneRaTing oUR oWn PaTh

gUSTavo eSTeva

Esteva exposes and debunks a set of en-trenched misconceptions and myths that guide Mexican and U.S. development poli-cies and ultimately drive peasant migra-tion. Drawing on historical examples and logic, Esteva tackles the notion that the road to “progress” requires industrialization and urbanization, rejects the “American way of life” as a universally valid development blueprint, and challenges the economic principle of comparative advantages. Es-teva’s alternative development vision focuses on rebuilding food sovereignty and self-sufficiency of rural communities through the revitalization of small-scale peasant ag-riculture. Specific policy proposals include improved land tenure security, technologi-cal innovation, ecological restoration, and support for sustainable farming practices.

IntroductionThis essay concentrates on the analysis of initiatives and policies that foster the permanence of peasants in their own communities in Mexico. It focuses on economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sensible ideas for peasants to find appropriate and dignified ways to earn a living so that they will not be forced to migrate. It does not discuss the following aspects:

• U.S. policy—The United States could contribute to mitigating temporary and permanent immigration from Mexico, according to its own inter-ests, without recourse to repressive measures. The most important thing would be to disseminate trustworthy information about the phenomenon in order to fight existing prejudices.1

• “Brain drain”—A growing number of Mexican professionals and scientists are migrating to the United States. Generally, they are welcome in the United States and have little trouble regularizing their legal status. Mexico

needs to stop this leakage of highly trained individuals.

• Temporary, contract migration—Over the years, groups of Mexican peasants and U.S. agricultural producers have established stable arrangements for contracting labor during harvest sea-son. Producers require security in avail-ability of labor during critical periods, thus preferring stable and trustworthy arrangements. Peasants get appropri-ate salaries and working conditions: in two to three months’ work, they receive the income they need for one whole year and are able to keep grow-ing their own crops and perform other activities in their own communities.

• Urban migration—A growing share of Mexican migrants to the United States comes from cities. This population de-mands specific initiatives and policies.

PrejudicesThe Mexican government’s policy frame-work is based on deeply rooted preju-dices (misconceptions), which are shared by their U.S. counterparts, by the media, and by wide sectors of Mexican society, especially among the middle and upper classes. It is worthwhile to first examine this framework, which is the principal obstacle to creating sensible policies, measures, and initiatives aimed at stop-ping migration.

Surplus Population, Urbaniza-tion, and DevelopmentFor a long time, but especially over the last half-century, a marked prejudice has arisen regarding the existence of a surplus population in rural areas. In the nine-teenth century it was a common thing to hear that Mexico had too many “Indi-ans”: it was critical to educate them into extinction (as “Indians”), transform them into “regular Mexicans.” In the twentieth

century a similar complex prejudice has focused on the peasantry: there are too many of them. It is a widespread attitude among the Mexican elite who have ad-opted U.S. society as a model and who fail to take into account the reality and aspirations of a majority of Mexicans.2

Starting with José López Portillo’s presi-dential campaign in 1976, this prejudice was stated clearly: Mexico will be unable to become a modern, advanced country, as long as a third of its population remains in the countryside.3 The United States is capable of being the main agricultural producer in the world, using only 2.5 percent to 4 percent of its labor force, it was argued. The model implied that to modernize agriculture, Mexico needed to rid itself of peasants. As soon as he was sworn in as president, López Porti-llo adopted an aggressive modernizing rural policy, rooted in that conviction and on the new oil wealth. This policy soon “awakened ‘deep Mexico’ into re-action,” as Interior Minister Reyes Her-oles expressed with concern in 1978. Thus policy took a sharp turn with the Mexican Food System (1980–82). Even though this program had spectacularly successful results and should be taken into account when considering other policy changes, the shift to the current policy in 1982 dismantled the system of state supports for agriculture, built over the previous fifty years, discouraged peas-ant producers, and sought to reduce the rural population. This policy rests on a conviction that the road to progress necessarily requires in-dustrialization and urbanization, which take place to the detriment of the rural population. This orientation was clearly stamped on the policies of the Mexican governments in the last half century. As peasants were settling in the land

R e g e n e R a T i n g o U R o W n P a T h 3 3

redistributed by president Lázaro Cárde-nas (1934–40), who put half the coun-try’s arable land in the peasantry’s hands, official policy focused on “green revolu-tion” goals and on the artificial creation of a “modern agriculture” in the coun-try’s north. The aim was to meet labor demand through accelerating industri-alization, urbanization, and “liberating” rural areas from their “surplus” popula-tion. Thus the country went through a demographic transformation. In 1945, 75 percent of the population was in the countryside; fifty years later, only a third of the population remained. Lastly, the aforementioned prejudices are part of one that established over the last fifty years that economic and social development is a necessary and universal social aim for countries like Mexico. The predominant concept of development is clearly associated with the “American way of life” as the universal definition of a good life. Recognition that extend-ing this way of life to the whole planet is not feasible in economic and ecologi-cal terms led to policy changes aimed at meeting basic necessities, to guarantee certain minimal standards of welfare, but assuming this adjustment was considered a transitional stage. In sum, Mexico’s economic, political, and intellectual elite share the premise that there are too many peasants, that the rural way of life is inferior and backward, and that it should disappear as the coun-try develops.

Comparative AdvantagesThe theory of comparative advantage supports the promotion of free trade throughout the world. This theory pro-vides the fundamental orientation of the Mexican government’s policies, which, besides sponsoring free trade, attempt

to stimulate production in areas where Mexico has comparative advantages, and discourage it in those where competition with its main trade partners, especially the United States, seems impossible. In keeping with this orientation, Mexi-can authorities strive to steer commercial agriculture toward export crops of high economic density or toward crops for internal consumption that have inter-nationally competitive returns. At the same time, they discourage peasant ag-riculture, which they consider inefficient and unable to compete with commercial producers in national and international markets. The current policy tries to achieve a positive agricultural trade bal-ance, as close as possible to a production style that mirrors the contemporary ideal of “agriculture without people.” The prejudice is generally accepted that consistent application of the principle of comparative advantage will be beneficial to Mexico and all of its inhabitants, de-spite the great sacrifices it will demand of certain sectors in the short run. It is not possible to review all of the theo-retical and historical issues needed to counter the dominant prejudices. Before discussing alternative initiatives and poli-cies, however, we must first take the fol-lowing into account.

The Role of AgricultureHistory shows that industrialization rests on a strong agricultural sector. Today’s industrially advanced countries were able to base this process on an agricultural sector capable of sustaining it. Countries cannot grow like eucalypti, with a great canopy and a shallow root. In Mexico, the land reform policy of the 1930s, which continued over the next

several decades thanks to strong pressure from the peasantry, lay down the neces-sary foundations for an adequate indus-trialization process. Generally, however, the last half-century’s policies system-atically dismantled the rural sector, eco-nomically, socially, and ecologically. This orientation’s irrationality is akin to that of a contractor using ground-floor materials for building an edifice’s upper floors.

The Ideal of Urban LifeTruly, modernization has manifested it-self everywhere as accelerated urbaniza-tion, creating an ideal of the urban life. Immense population centers were thus created, Mexico City claiming first place globally with over twenty million people, a fifth of the country’s total population. Presently, however, these megacities keep

Cartoon by Helguera, courtesy of La Jornada.

34 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

advanced countries and has pernicious collateral effects. This is why true free-trade agreements have never been fully implemented in any country and all re-sort to regulation and protection. Nev-ertheless, a large share of the Mexican of-ficials involved in commercial opening, for the last twenty-five years, did not take into account historical precedents and ad-opted the doctrine of comparative advan-tages with dogmatic fundamentalism. Such fundamentalism reverberates wide-ly in attitudes and policies, which can-not all be examined here. However we must underline a very relevant aspect for migration. The theory and principles of comparative advantages do not apply at all for the majority of Mexican peas-ants, because they do not produce for the market and they reject that the fruits of their labor, maize in particular, be treated as commodities. The implicit economic rationality of the theory of compara-tive advantages has no bearing on them, because their behavior is motivated by principles other than those established by the theory.

What Is to Be DoneRevalue and support economically feasi-ble, socially just, and ecologically sensible ways of rural life. Policies or programs conceived and implemented for the rural sector as a totality should be abandoned and substituted for those addressing the heterogeneity of the reality on the ground, which requires differential treat-ments for every rural actor.4 Official pol-icy and social efforts must be oriented to prioritize peasants. Commercial agricul-ture must be let to fend for itself, under market pressures. Despite the permanent hostility to which they have been subjected for over five hundred years, there are now more peasants in Mexico than ever before, in absolute terms. This is a deeply vital sector, fully committed to its way of living, as evinced especially by indigenous peoples. The only so-cial indicator that has not shifted in

growing only in the global south. There is growing conscience in “advanced” countries that modern cities are unsus-tainable; giant population centers are be-ginning to shrink, as rural and suburban lifestyles are vindicated as real options, despite the fact that productive activities are still tied to cities. At the same time, numerous studies following a strict cost-benefit analysis demonstrate that peasant agriculture is more efficient than com-mercial production.

The Myth of DevelopmentStarting in the 1980s, the myth of devel-opment has been subjected to penetrating criticism and the concept of post-devel-opment has been established concurrent-ly. Academic institutions and pragmatic, everyday actions of millions of people have converged to rid us of the notion of a universal definition of the good life, as associated with the American Dream, and to vindicate the multiple alternative ways of defining the good life. In contrast with conventional development thinking centered on economic growth, a multi-tude of policies and initiatives now focus on materializing alternative definitions of the good life that are economically and ecologically feasible and socially just.

The Myth of Comparative AdvantagesStarting with David Ricardo’s original formulation, the theory of comparative advantages argues in favor of free trade under the assumption of complete and per-fect mobility of all factors of production. For the principle of comparative advantages to be valid, there should be free circula-tion of labor, capital, and goods between trading countries. This is how the United States was built, once barriers between the original thirteen colonies were torn down. This is the principle that is success-fully applied in the European Union. This principle, however, has not been a part of the North-South free-trade negotiations. It is well known that free trade, which theoretically benefits all countries, is al-ways more beneficial to more industrially

Jumping the Fence. Tijuana. A worker looks over the fence between Mexico and the U.S., trying to find a moment when the Border Patrol may not be looking so that he can cross. Photo by David Bacon.

R e g e n e R a T i n g o U R o W n P a T h 3 5

This policy implies that the agricultural chapter of NAFTA be renegotiated, un-der terms that address the needs of mil-lions of Mexican peasants. Corn and beans should be protected fully. At the same time, the notion of food sover-eignty and its legal expression should be discussed in a nationwide debate.

Food Self-sufficiencyFood sovereignty is expressed in practice as food self-sufficiency, which involves three distinct elements:

• Capacity to produce enough food for all• Capacity to achieve this production with

the country’s resources and technology

Food Sovereignty The general policy change could start with an emphasis on food sovereign-ty.5 This term is contaminated by its association with the state but in pres-ent usage, as it applies to communities, regions and the entire nation, it signi-fies self-determination of diet guidelines and how to satisfy them. The aim is that people, communities, and the country in general determine for themselves the quantities and quality of their food, and that the whole population has access to sufficient foodstuffs to satisfy their basic necessities, according to their own defi-nitions of the good life, their customs, and traditions.

the last half century in Mexico is the number of small rural communities (those of up to 2,500 dwellers), which amount to over 110,000. Every year, some communities disappear, but are replaced by new ones. The defense of this way of life is supported by a grow-ing number of urban dwellers that flock to these communities, fleeing the nightmare of living in large cities. Instead of attacking peasants, seeking to expel them from the countryside and their productive activities, they should receive massive support from the government and society. This pol-icy would substantially abate peasant emigration to the United States.

Gloria Merino (r), a Triqui curandera, or traditional doctor, her niece, Catalina Ramirez Merino (l), and a third Triqui woman in a traditional huipil, together with a group of Triqui children. Photo by David Bacon.

36 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

practices, ecologically sensible at the scale they were implemented for centu-ries, turned destructive once they could not be implemented in the traditional way.6 Policies and actions aimed at en-vironmental regeneration can contribute substantially to abate peasant emigra-tion. Policies in this area include the following:

• Revaluation of empirical knowledge. Peasants have great knowledge about how to maintain a sensible relation with nature. This knowledge has been systematically marginalized and un-dervalued.

• Emergency regeneration. Large ar-eas of the country suffer extreme

National self-sufficiency objectives should be carefully examined. Peasant agriculture cannot be expected to meet the cities’ demand for food; it will be able to meet the needs of the rural popula-tion and generate some surpluses. Urban needs must be tended to by commercial agriculture and imports.

Environmental RegenerationHabitat destruction is a major factor pushing peasant emigration. Irrespon-sible practices by public and private developers and the expansion of livestock breeding on agricultural lands largely eroded or destroyed the peasantry’s pro-duction conditions and its capacity for autonomous subsistence. Some of their

• Self-reliance of producers, commu-nities, regions, and the country as a whole, all along the food production chain and covering all of its processes.

Self-sufficiency does not mean autarchy and must be defined in relative terms, both in its component parts as in its levels. It does not discard imports but keeps them to a reasonable minimum on basic foodstuffs. Also it tries to keep market forces from de-termining rural production. For very differ-ent reasons, “advanced” countries apply this principle by strongly subsidizing their rural sectors. A central motivation for peasant emigration is their inability to grow enough food to feed their families. Restoring this ability should be a central policy objective.

Altar, Sonora. The path through the desert to the border to cross into the US starts here, north of Route 2, which goes through the Sonoran desert just south of the line. Photo by David Bacon.

R e g e n e R a T i n g o U R o W n P a T h 3 7

environmental degradation, and they must be urgently dealt with to avoid a greater catastrophe.

• Protection of production. Many en-vironmental protection measures are often planned to the detriment of peasants, who are turned into “envi-ronmental stewards” at best. Using the appropriate technology, it would be possible to treat the areas that re-quire protection without displacing peasants. The same principles could be applied to the entire set of peasant productive activities.

• Cultivation of water management. Very special attention must be paid to all aspects of water extraction, storage, safety, and distribution. The water wars have already started and, in general, peasants are on the losing side, thanks to the economic and political pressure of more pow-erful groups, many of which use wa-ter irrationally, monopolizing and destroying its sources. Appropriate technologies that would meet peas-ants’ needs with modest investments and changes to current practices are already at our disposal but usu-ally face the interests of dominant structures. A policy that would give peasants preference over water use rights and help them use it sustain-ably would have immediate effects on their capacity for autonomous subsistence and, hence, lower emi-gration pressures.

• The saving of forests and jungles. Mexico has lost half of its forest and jungle coverage. There are multiple examples, many internationally rec-ognized, that demonstrate autono-mous communal organizations’ ca-pacity to adequately manage forests and jungles. Their activities compare favorably with those of forestry firms, if ecological, economic, and social criteria are strictly applied, and not only those of maximum profit. This activity can offer wide possibilities for peasants’ employment and in-come, but it needs to be supported, not attacked.

Security in Land TenureThe effects of the 1992 constitutional amendment that opened ejido and com-munal lands to market forces have not met expectations about modernization, production, or productivity. On the con-trary, it has produced a great deal of in-security and conflict. The arbitrary and corrupt application of the new agrarian laws has led to the continuous plunder of peasant communities, particularly indigenous ones, leaving them with no other option but migration. This issue is of enormous significance and calls for large legal and institutional changes, which will only be possible if a different policy orientation is adopted.

Democratic PracticesAlthough Mexico is formally a democra-cy, it lacks many of the characteristics of a truly democratic society. Social strug-gles are currently working toward:

• Perfecting representative democracy to eliminate fraud, fine tuning electoral processes, and insuring the applica-tion of the rule of law and checks and balances

• Representative democracy: plebiscite, public referendum, recall elections, public office accountability, participa-tory budgeting, transparency, etc.

• Subordinating these forms to radical democracy, where citizens make the decisions that affect their lives and steer the work of public officials.

Few policies would contribute to reduce

emigration as much as democratic con-solidation.

Reintegrating the Structure of ProductionColonial heritage and insensible industri-alization clearly separated primary sector production and final demand. Process-ing agricultural products on an adequate scale can be the link to reconnect them, avoiding traditional commercial chains and waste. In addition to raising the val-ue of peasant production, processing ag-ricultural products can be a strong source of employment for peasant youths, espe-cially in the off-season. This would help to create sources of dignified income for those who, unable to find them in rural communities, would otherwise be forced to emigrate. Technology policy needs redefining. Re-orienting technology policies to support the adoption of so-called “appropriate technologies,” which are adequate for the conditions under which peasant produc-ers operate and which can be appropri-ated by them, is of special importance. It is critical to stimulate technological innovation, as well. There is a wide field of possibilities, where a modest invest-ment can translate into solid productive opportunities.

Among the main prejudices we seek 1. to fight are: 1) the conviction that undocumented workers negatively affect the salaries and jobs of U.S. citizens; 2) the general conviction

38 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

that extreme poverty is the root cause of Mexican migration to the United States; 3) the conviction of U.S. citizens that people the world over want to live in the United States, in pursuit of the American Dream; 4) the general conviction that the United States is the result of English colonization and that the presence of Hispanics in the territo-ry was irrelevant, which helped cre-ate an anti-Hispanic “black legend” that feeds broad prejudices against today’s immigrants. They adopted this model even to 2. name the country: United Mexican States. In the Consulting Council meet-3. ings of the PRI’s Institute of Politi-cal, Economic, and Social Studies, which handled key tasks during Ló-

pez Portillo’s campaign, Edmundo Flores formulated the candidate’s policy in these terms. See, among other sources, Revista del Consejo Consultivo del IEPES, nos. 1–3. Numerous studies show that even 4. policies demanded by all peasants, such as guaranteed, minimum sup-port prices, have very negative con-sequences for those who need them most. Equal treatment to unequal partners is unjust and counterpro-ductive. The notion of food sovereignty 5. has been widely vindicated in both academia and political struggles, the world over. In Mexico the con-cept enjoys broad recognition. The LIX Congress recently passed the National Food Sovereignty and Security Act that attempted to syn-

thesize the main consensus on the issue, but eventually contradicted substantive aspects. Numerous studies show that raze 6. and burn practices that were ap-plied for centuries in tropical areas allow appropriate regeneration of the vegetation, because cultivated areas are abandoned cyclically and new ones are opened up. When peasants are forced to cultivate a patch of land indefinitely, a vi-cious spiral of cultivation and erosion arises. This circumstance worsens when livestock breeders occupy the land, as has happened extensively in Chiapas. For exam-ple, see Víctor Toledo, Ecología, Espiritualidad, Conocimiento (Morelia: Jitanjáfora Morelia Edi-torial, 2006).

R e g e n e R a T i n g o U R o W n P a T h 3 9

agUaxaca: The common TaSk of conSeRving The Rio

aToyac-SalaDo WaTeR DiSTRicT

The name “aguaxaca” evokes the sacredness of wa-ter. Through this initiative, society and government seek to protect the natural resources on which water availability depends, while attempting to improve the living conditions of city and rural dwellers.

aguaxaca encompasses the drainage area of the atoyac and Salado rivers, from the mountains to the urban areas, where some six hundred thousand peo-ple live. Rapid urbanization fosters the uncontrolled rise of demand for water, while reducing the collec-tion surface. The combined atoyac-Salado is one of the country’s most polluted rivers, the principal con-taminant being raw sewage.

Under the auspices of the oaxacan nature and So-ciety institute, and working hand in hand with its community and institutional allies, aguaxaca aims to conserve the “natural sponges” that remain; to restore cities’ and towns’ potable water networks; to improve rainwater collection; to make agricultural irrigation more efficient; to promote saving and ra-tioning urban water use; to establish a fair price for potable water service and to support the communi-ties that insure the flow of water; and to return safe, treated water to the environment.

To accomplish its goals, aguaxaca integrates:• The Picture: to capture the natural and social set-

ting of the drainage area, through participatory research and a holistic approach.

• The Panel: to involve all the institutional and local actors, through the oaxacan Water forum.

• The Plan: to consensually set the rules of the game.

• The Tools: to take concrete and demonstrative ac-tions to foster conservation and social welfare, and to build capacity by linking traditional knowl-edge with modern techniques.

• The Voice: to inform about water issues in the com-munities and the city, and to facilitate consensus democratically.

examples of strategy implementation:• Public policy discussions at the Oaxacan Water

forum involving local, state, and federal officials,

community leaders, ngos, academic researchers, and private think tanks.

• Design of financial mechanisms to establish a fair price for urban water-use rights and to reimburse rural communities for aquifer conservation ser-vices.

• Establishment of demonstration centers that show-case permaculture techniques, waste disposal, water management, soil conservation and organic horticulture, and raise environmental awareness in the population.

• The “Innovations in Efficient Irrigation and Sus-tainable Production” project created a financial mechanism to assist small producers in investing in greenhouses and irrigation systems that save water, increasing and diversifying agricultural pro-duction and taking care of the environment. To-gether, they help build a green belt around the city of oaxaca to constrain its growth and to ensure its water supply.

• The Water Festival promotes environmental aware-ness through a poster competition, videos, week-ly radio shows, and the Song for Water contest. aguaxaca was a kyoto World Water grand Prize finalist in 2006. The accomplishments presented in kyoto included:

• The increased social and natural knowledge of the atoyac-Salado river drainage area

• The consolidation of the Oaxacan Water Forum as a plural and multidisciplinary space for planning and discussion

• Widespread reforestation of the river’s drainage area

• Establishment and operation of pilot centers for soil conservation and regeneration and stream restoration

• Dozens of workshops on alternative technologies, such as ecological toilets, efficient wood-burning stoves, efficient irrigation systems, and sustain-able production practices

• Diffusion of the project and its aims; fostering hori-zontality in policy discussions; and local, national, and international cooperation

• Education of the rural population and awareness creation in the urban population.

40 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

nafTa anD immigRaTion: ToWaRD a WoRkable anD hUmane inTegRaTion

by laURa caRlSen

Carlsen expands on narrowly trade-focused evaluations of North American free-trade policies to offer a broad-based critique of NAFTA that links deepening economic and social disparities between the U.S. and Mexico with increased mi-gration flows. Exposing the agreement’s structural biases, Carlsen contrasts the benefits accrued by transnational corpo-rations with rising unemployment and insecurity experienced by Mexican work-ers and peasants. Carlsen’s reform propos-als offer a broad array of interconnected changes in both trade immigration poli-cies, including state-led protection of weak economic sectors and the “common good,” movement toward a fair-trade frame-work through grassroots-inspired and community-led development solutions, expansion of viable paths to citizenship, and improved adherence to international human rights and labor standards.

IntroductionEvery hour, Mexico imports one and a half million dollars’ worth of agricultural and food products, almost all from the United States. In that same hour, thirty people—men, women, and children—leave their homes in the Mexican coun-tryside to take up the most dangerous journey of their lives, as migrant workers to the United States.1 No matter what one’s stance on these two defining char-acteristics of our age—economic integra-tion and immigration—one thing is ab-solutely clear: they are related. For the past fifteen years, the market-based trade and investment policies em-bodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have led to a mas-sive South-North flow of immigrants, while restrictive immigration laws in the United States create a North-South push-back. Like opposing wind currents that confront forces, the result is a storm.

This storm has decimated the Mexican countryside. It has created unemploy-ment, inequality, and insecurity on both sides of the border and left the U.S. im-migration system in shambles. Until U.S. trade and immigration policies change direction, the storm will continue to gather force.

Unequal Integration and BorderlineThe misnamed North American Free Trade Agreement actually sought to “lock in” a broad range of economic reforms,2 including tariff elimination but also in-vestment guarantees, a stringent intellec-tual property regime, and rules limiting government involvement in the economy. In Mexico, many of these reforms began with the 1982 debt crisis, expanded with 1986 GATT membership, and extended when then-president Salinas de Gortari carried out market reforms to prepare the Mexican economy for NAFTA.3 NAFTA established a new bar for market access and foreign investor guarantees. Tariff barriers were a small part of the overall agreement, since Mexico had already unilaterally lowered many tariffs.

Up against a compliant Mexican negoti-ating team committed to the interests of its own economic elite—and behind the backs of both publics—U.S. negotiators achieved terms favorable to large corpora-tions, such as investment promotion pro-visions, intellectual property protection, new markets, and access to resources, in-cluding cheap labor. The result was a trade agreement that was unprecedented in the world.4 Even strategic products and servic-es were slated for tariff and barrier elimi-nations under NAFTA, and the Mexican state relinquished basic development policy tools, such as government procure-ment preferences to support local indus-try, management of the basic food chain,

and performance requirements for foreign companies regarding technology transfer, backward linkages, or adoption of state-of-the-art environmental practices.

Measured by the degree of integration, the NAFTA experiment has been ex-tremely successful. The U.S.-Mexico border has become the most highly in-tegrated region of the world and a labo-ratory for economic integration—$35 million of goods cross the border ev-ery hour.5 The International Monetary Fund reports that total trade among the three NAFTA countries has more than doubled, while total merchandise trade between the United States and Mexico nearly tripled, from $81.6 in 1993 to $266.6 by 2004.6 But there are serious signs that the exper-iment is failing. Although the U.S. econ-omy was more than fifteen times larger than Mexico’s and the Mexican economy suffered from major disadvantages,7 there was no weight given to a need to compensate for the disparities between the two, as was done in the European Union.8 Despite claims that NAFTA would bring about convergence between the U.S. and Mexican economies, eco-nomic disparities between these nations have actually increased over time.9 As the following graph shows, the enormous gap between Mexican and U.S. GDP per capita has actually widened slightly since NAFTA—the opposite of what was blithely predicted. During the NAFTA period, U.S. GDP per capita rose while the Mexican rate essentially flatlined.

NAFTA also failed to bring about con-vergence in wage levels as promised. In 1993 Mexican manufacturing workers earned on average 14.7 percent of the U.S. hourly manufacturing wage; by 2003 the figure had dropped to 11.3 percent.10

n a f T a a n D i m m i g R a T i o n 4 1

Under NAFTA, the real minimum wage in Mexico has decreased to a level that no longer can sustain workers.

The U.S.-Mexico border in many ways is the eye of the storm referred to earlier. From the Pacific Ocean, through Arizona deserts, to the Gulf of Mexico, the region has become an area of intense interaction between the two countries, but also of in-creasing violence, hostility, and conflict.

The rapid transformation of the Mexican economy under NAFTA has displaced workers and eroded livelihoods. In a se-ries of socially coerced conversions, farm-ers and factory workers have become mi-grants, migrants have been pronounced criminals, and these “criminals” have been forced underground.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The promises of NAFTA supporters in the early nineties assured citizens of both Mexico and the United States that con-vergence, employment, and a robust Mexican economy would result in a more prosperous and harmonious North America, where undocumented migra-tion would be a thing of the past. So why does the current situation look so different?

The Debate: Is NAFTA to blame?There is a basic consensus that the post-NAFTA era has not seen significant gains for the Mexican people. For the major-ity, promises of higher standards of liv-ing have not been borne out. Instead, Mexico faces an employment crisis and flat real wages, price hikes—especially for

basic goods, economic insecurity, and ris-ing inequality.

There is an ongoing debate over to what degree these evident economic woes can be attributed to NAFTA. Since eco-nomic restructuring measures predated NAFTA and domestic policy plays a role, it is not possible to completely untangle the causes of the current situation. But the main point to bear in mind is that NAFTA was not just a trade policy for Mexico. It was the cornerstone of its eco-nomic restructuring, designed to lock in an export-oriented, market economy. After NAFTA, Mexico went on to sign forty-two trade agreements modeled on NAFTA, making it the free trade cham-pion of the world. However, these are largely irrelevant given that 90 percent of Mexico’s trade is with just one country, the United States.

Mexico bet the house on export-led, open-market economic development tied to the U.S. economy. Exports grew, but who really benefited? Only 1.2 per-cent of Mexico’s three million registered businesses engage in non-oil exports. The Ministry of the Economy reports that in 2005 37,344 businesses exported under NAFTA and divided among themselves $186 billion dollars reported for that year. Even within this small group, bene-fits concentrate in a handful: 601 compa-nies—1.6 percent of exporters and only 0.02 percent of all businesses, mostly transnationals—receive 76.3 percent of the export value, or $142 billion.11 Nice work, if you can get it.

To benefit these lucky few, Mexico gave up its right to adopt policies to support sectors that provided strategic services to the country but were unable to compete on the world market.

Figure 1: GDP per capita, current dollars PPP. Graph by Global Exchange.

Figure 2: Mexican Real Wage Index. Graph by Global Exchange.

42 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

• Renegotiate NAFTA´s agricultural chapter. The terms of NAFTA must be modified to permit government regulation of basic food production and supply, and provide policy instru-ments so poor Mexican farmers are not forced to compete with subsidized large companies for their own markets. The petition to withdraw corn and beans from the free-trade agreement and support small farmers and food sovereignty is not a blow against free-trade precepts but a common-sense demand for public policy that places livelihoods and jobs first.

• There must be mechanisms of flexibil-ity when the terms of trade threaten livelihoods, food security, or health. This flexibility has been lacking in NAFTA and other FTAs. Negotiations have been inflexible, with developing countries finally giving in to terms they know will harm part of their pop-ulation. The pound of flesh exacted from poor countries in exchange for access to the U.S. market in the end hurts both partner countries and the United States, since the terms of the agreements exacerbate inequality and close off opportunities, leading to in-creased immigration and potential so-cial unrest.

• Do unbiased and comprehensive im-pact studies. There is a false dichotomy presented to us: protectionism, seen as an evil of the past, and free trade, seen as the only path to the future. The Bush administration has presented unmitigated free trade as if it were syn-onymous with freedom in the politi-cal realm, even though there are many historical experiences that prove that the two do not automatically correlate. In Latin America, the administration has used this erroneous assumption to divide nations between allies that are “democratic, open-market sup-porters” and enemies that supposedly threaten U.S. security. In reality, many of the latter are countries searching to diminish the polarizing effects of

A new policy would assure predictability and stable markets for U.S. producers, guarantees—not privileges—for U.S. in-vestors, and basic rights for workers every-where. It will imply a more active role of governments in balancing a competitive open-market system with protection of weaker sectors and the common good.

It will also mean denying some of the demands large corporations make in the name of competitiveness. This is not necessarily negative—it is past time to break up powerful monopolies that distort the terms of trade. If there is one thing we have learned from NAFTA, it is that “trickle down” does not work un-less you squeeze at the top. Companies must recognize responsibility for the communities whose labor and resources go to make the products they sell and the profits they reap.

U.S. regional trade policy has sent many of our communities into crises. New trade and immigration policies can help pull them out, and avoid a similar fate for other communities. The Bush ad-ministration is pushing hard to pass the three free-trade agreements (FTAs) before Congress—Colombia, Panama and South Korea—as part of creating a historic legacy and leaving in place pro-corporate policies that are difficult to re-verse. This creates an unavoidable battle in the short-term that could very well be won by a broad (not detail-oriented) op-position with unity of purpose.

• Call a moratorium on all new FTAs, including the three before Congress now. The moratorium should last un-til new studies have been thoroughly evaluated on the immediate and long-term impact of FTAs in the United States and signing countries to deter-mine whether this model works. The South Korea, Colombia, and Panama FTAs before Congress should be re-jected not just for the particular cir-cumstances of each case but because the FTA model is seriously flawed as trade and foreign policy.

Recommendations

1. TradeWhat we already know about NAFTA-style free-trade agreements is that along with increasing trade, they generate in-equality. One study shows that urban wage inequality grew from 0.408 in 1989 (Gini index) to 0.46 in 2000.12 Adopt-ing a trade policy that widens the gap between rich and poor here and abroad does nobody a service in the long term. Unless we change course, the social costs of our current trade policy will grow over the years and what we already see—un-employment and underemployment in our communities and abroad, environ-mental degradation, natural resource de-pletion, and growing gaps between those who benefit and those who are harmed—could develop into more serious problems of instability and widespread poverty.

On top of the broccoli machine, pulled behind a tractor, women pack the heads of broccoli cut by the men working below. They wear bandannas around their faces to protect them from breathing dust, and as a shield from the sun. Many workers in this crew are indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and Guerrero. Photo by David Bacon.

n a f T a a n D i m m i g R a T i o n 4 3

coffee to handicrafts, community-run credit unions, and a myriad of other small-scale endeavors. These require little resources and can have major ben-eficial consequences. They should be supported.• Support family farmers in all countries.

Worldwide it is the smallholder farm-ers who feed us. With over 200,000 farmers forced out of farming in the United States and millions in Mexico, it’s time to take a careful look at their overall contribution to society. U.S. farm policy should assure farmers everywhere a fair price by enforcing antitrust legislation to break the stran-glehold of agribusiness over our food production, and ban dumping that al-lows them to undermine food produc-tion in Mexico and other countries.15

for everyone. Increased international trade in itself is not a measure of suc-cess. Families with economic security, children with food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads—these should be the yardsticks for measur-ing success and they should be applied not only within the United States but to our partner countries as well. If the immigration problem has taught us anything, it’s that in a globalized world the inequities experienced in one country will spill over into the next. Turning away from an orthodox free-trade model in no way means rejecting or reversing all liberalization measures. But it does mean that each country, in-cluding the United States, has a right to develop national economic policies that view the international market as a tool, not a holy grail. Strategic sec-tors require protection, workers’ rights must be actively defended, and more flexible mechanisms such as special products, safeguards, and exemptions, should be allowed in order to promote development.

• Promote grassroots solutions. Commu-nities have already begun to develop community redevelopment projects to deal with the damage caused by NAFTA, as well as demanding modi-fications to the agreement. A new trade policy can find many pointers in these local experiences (see Esteva and Bartra in this volume). In the United States, funds for community redevelopment led by residents would be far more effective than the current NAFTA Adjustment Assistance pro-gram. People themselves are best at defining the skills they need to rebuild in a new environment and the kind of projects that will provide jobs, gener-ate income and serve a real need in the community.

In Mexico, grassroots solutions include community organizations working on en-vironmentally sound farming practices,14 fair-trade cooperatives that make direct links to consumers in everything from

trade and investment liberalization. Until we reject ideological posturing and analyze the real impact of FTAs we will never arrive at more just and viable trade policies for all our coun-tries and a more prosperous and stable hemisphere. To develop a sustainable and fair trade policy, the debate must become less dogmatic and more prag-matic. It’s time to take a close look at what is really happening under free trade agreements and be open to cor-rections or creative changes in course. For years, governments have ignored or sought to patch over the serious problems generated in the United States and Mexico by NAFTA. There now exists abundant information on trade flows from the office of the United States Trade Representative but little on the impact of FTAs on human lives. Congress should call for studies that report the trade and investment data, but also provide information on social indices and concrete examples, even where direct cause and effect with NAFTA is difficult to ascertain.

• The results then should be heeded. One of the very few studies on the impact of NAFTA in Mexico was done by the General Accounting Office in 2005. The study concluded that there was an urgent need for rural compensa-tion funds.13 Nothing was done. Since then, many of the negative impacts predicted in the study have been borne out with no policy response whatsoev-er. The decimation of the campesino economy in many parts of Mexico as a result of economic integration without transitions or support has resulted in millions of farmers forced to migrate.

• Regulate trade, don’t mandate free trade. The free-trade model devel-oped in the 1980s and 1990s has proven unsuccessful in solving the major challenges of decreasing pov-erty, leveling inequality, and promot-ing sustainable development. There is no longer (if there ever was) a global or national consensus that FTAs work

“In free trade democracies, what matters is not democracy, just free trade.” Cartoon by Fisgon,

courtesy of La Jornada.

44 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

being. By holding deportation and blacklisting over the heads of workers, these programs have led to employer abuse, and there are documented cases that border on slavery conditions.17

• Suspend enforcement programs that include deportation, raids, racial pro-filing, militarization of the border, and fencing. End criminalization of migrants and militarization of the bor-der. These are lose-lose policies costing millions of taxpayers’ dollars with the visible effect of dividing communi-ties and endangering human lives and without eliminating illegal border crossings.

• Strengthen a single standard of labor rights, defending all workers, both native and foreign born (see Lujan in this volume).

• Separate security and anti-organized crime measures from immigration en-forcement. Customs and Border offi-cials should be concentrating on illegal drugs and arms traffickers, rather than spending a significant amount of their resources on pursuing undocumented immigrants in the desert. Reducing the number of unauthorized entries by expanding work visas and family reunification permits, and supporting Mexican development and revamping trade policies are first steps, but poli-cies must also distinguish between mi-grants and organized crime in order to be more effective and avoid a public perception that migrants are common criminals.

• Strengthen human rights guarantees and protect civil liberties of migrants, including stringent measures against human trafficking and slavery, signing and upholding the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrants, restoring due process for immigration charges, and entering into binational agreements that limit the use of arms and vio-lence against undocumented workers and respect rights and humanitarian

formed public. The SPP, in which only business representatives and government officials define the exten-sion of NAFTA rules, should be reject-ed in favor of open discussions, access to all information on rule changes and proposals, and active participation of affected sectors, including labor, envi-ronmentalists, and human rights and civil liberties groups.

2. Immigration16 Basic Demands:• Provide legal residency visas to immi-

grants currently in the United States who meet basic criteria. This will per-mit them to move between jobs, with security for themselves and their fami-lies, and travel out of the country. This flexibility, now impossible due to their unrecognized status and the enor-mous backlog of visa and citizenship requests, would make it possible for those who may choose not to remain in the United States to return to their places of origin without losing the op-tion to return. In the past, migration patterns were often cyclical. Today restrictionist measures have made that impossible, thus increasing the num-ber of permanent migrants, whether authorized or not.

• Facilitate and broaden family reunifica-tion measures. Family ties are among the strongest motivators of mobility in the world. If we turn our backs on the need to allow families to be together, we create an incentive for illegal immi-gration. Access to family reunification visas must be expanded and funding released to expedite processing of re-quests pending.

• Develop a viable path to citizenship for long-time immigrant workers and resi-dents in the United States.

• Expand the number of green cards available. Guest-worker programs that permit only seasonal work and visas based on a specific employment sepa-rate the labor power from the human

• Accompany trade policy with aid for sustainable development. U.S. aid to Mexico should be used to encourage efforts like the grassroots solutions discussed above and compensate for damage done by NAFTA. NAFTA’s extension, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), has gone off in the complete opposite direction. Instead of directing aid and programs to re-gions negatively affected by the agree-ment, it has facilitated business for transnational corporations—the only sector of society directly represented in its negotiations. Most recently, the SPP process has led to Plan Mexico, a proposal to dramatically increase aid to Mexico, but for law enforcement, intelligence, and military equipment. This creates a grave danger of milita-rizing a politically polarized Mexico and increasing the potential for con-flict. Creating healthy employment in the United States and Mexico would have a far greater impact on reducing the illegal drug trade than surveillance planes, and would also be more ef-fective in reducing immigration pres-sures.

• Open up the debate. Trade and inte-gration policies affect all citizens and define the course of the nation. They should be broadly debated by an in-

Agricultural laborers at grain depot. Photo courtesy of La Jornada.

n a f T a a n D i m m i g R a T i o n 4 5

concerns. The raids must be ended immediately as a violation of basic principles of justice. Violators of im-migration law should receive due process and the integrity of families should be respected. Local enforce-ment agents should not be involved in immigration prosecution, since their job is to fight crime in communities.

• Reject guest-worker or temporary worker programs, skilled or unskilled. Guest worker programs create two-tiered labor pools and encourage the violation of labor rights for immigrant workers. Instead we must expand legal

work opportunities, and work toward legalization of current workers, full-employment, and livable wage pro-grams. The right to organize must be honored in all workplaces, with com-panies liable for intents to undermine or deny that right.

• Restore a real refugee program that gives credence to refugees facing dan-ger in their home countries. Mexican requests for refugee status in Canada have increased sharply, related to threats from drug cartels, domestic violence, threats of hate crimes against homosexuals, government repression,

and other causes. These are routinely denied in the United States. They should be thoroughly reviewed and judged on their merits.

Entering the Final PhaseNAFTA has now entered the last stage of implementation, with the elimination of tariffs on corn, beans, and other sensi-tive agricultural products. With severely negative impacts predicted for Mexican farmers and an accumulation of social problems in all three countries, this phase obliges us to finally take NAFTA to task for how it has affected the daily lives of North American citizens.

“El campo mexicano en el laberinto neoliberal,” 1. La Jornada del Campo, October 9, 2007.Laura Carlsen, “North America Doesn´t Exist,” America’s Policy Program Report, July 3, 2008, http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5343. 2. The most important of these was the 1992 reform to Art. 27 of the Constitution that allowed parceling ejidos and indigenous communi-3. ties and selling individual plots. See Maxwell A. Cameron,4. The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). U.S. Commerce Department official David Bohigian, October 20, 2006, as reported in Eric Green, “U.S. Seeks To Balance Trade, 5. Security Concerns on Mexico Border,” America.gov, October 20, 2006, http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/October/200610201721221xeneerg0.9683802.html.Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott, 6. NAFTA Revisited (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2005).In 1993, the Mexican GDP was $402.2 billion USD, compared to the U.S. GDP of $6.58 trillion. 7. John Cavanagh and Sarah Anderson. 8. Lessons from European Integration for the Americas, (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2004). See Laura Carlsen, “El mito de la convergencia,” Programa de las Américas, September 15, 2005, http://www.ircamericas.org/esp/629.9. Blecker, Robert “North American Economies After NAFTA”, International Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 33, #3, Fall 2003. p. 19 10. from World Bank, World Development Indicators ; and U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “International Compari-sons of Hourly Compensation Costs for Production Workers in Manufacturing, 2003” and “Supplementary Tables, 1975-2003,” http://www.bls.gov/fls/home.htm. Statistics from Auditoría Superior de la Federación 2007, cited by Carlos Fernandez Vega, 11. La Jornada. July 10, 2007.Samuel Freije, et al., “Changes in Urban Wage Inequality in Mexico, Before and After NAFTA,” Third Annual Conference of the Euro-12. Latin Network on Integration and Trade, Kiel, Germany, October 21–22, 2005, http://www.iadb.org/intal/aplicaciones/uploads/ponen-cias/foro_elsnit_2005_02_freijeetal.pdf. General Accountability Office, “U.S: Agencies Need Greater Focus to Support Mexico´s Successful Transition to Liberalized Agricul-13. tural Trade under NAFTA,” U.S. Government Accountability Office, Washington, DC. March 2005. http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d05272high.pdf. See Laura Carlsen, “Building a Future in the Mixteca,” Americas Policy Program, Voices of the Countryside #2, October 12, 2006, 14. http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3593. Dennis Olson, 15. Trade Deals Ignore Agricultural Impacts on Immigration (Minneapolis, MN: Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, 2007), http://www.iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?accountID=500&refid=100988. These recommendations are based on my own thoughts and suggestions from a number of sources, including David Bacon, Tom Barry, 16. “Over-Raided, Under Siege” (by the National Network on Immigrant and Refugee Rights), and others.See Mary Bauer, 17. Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2007), http://www.splcenter.org/legal/guestreport/index.jsp

notes

46 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

conTemPlaTing SolUTionS To migRaTion challengeS

bill ong hing

Analyzing the relationship between NAFTA and Mexican undocumented labor immigration, Hing presents a com-prehensive suite of strategic labor reforms that transform immigration policy into a meaningful tool to address concerns about regional integration on both sides of the border. Hing focuses on long-term demographic and social trends generat-ing U.S. labor shortages and triggering a growing need for unskilled Mexican workers. He explores the European Union open trade–open labor model as a means to create an efficient labor market and meet U.S. labor demands, while reduc-ing migration pressures and maintaining border control. Hing emphasizes the need to couple such open labor policies with development assistance programs that de-crease disparities and address structural asymmetries between the U.S. and Mexi-can economies. He concludes that immi-gration policy reforms should be designed to respond to actual, demonstrated labor shortages, while maintaining restrictions that protect regional labor markets and providing meaningful and enforceable health, safety, and labor laws.

IntroductionUnderstanding the effects of NAFTA and other aspects of the globalized economy provides us with the founda-tion to develop a better approach to the flow of Mexican workers to the United States. The failure of current militarized and racialized enforcement strategies to further stem that flow challenges us to step back and address the issue more thoughtfully. In the United States, we tend to hear about the job losses suffered by U.S. workers because of NAFTA, but we do not hear much about Mexican job loss or consider the fact that the United States very well may need immigrant workers—even those who are low skilled and low-wage.

In addressing the phenomenon of labor and other migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, a need to contemplate new responses is evident. We must begin to consider closely the forces of globaliza-tion on this border. In essence, we need to develop a new vision for the border. As we develop that vision, we should remain cognizant of our historical as well as con-tinuing economic and social relationship with Mexico. We would also be well served to consider the social, economic, and political strategic needs in the con-text of our place in the world regionally, not simply nationalistically. A new vision of the border should embrace the following elements:• Open labor migration akin to that in

the European Union (EU)• Substantial investment in Mexico’s

economy and infrastructure to enable Mexico to create jobs and maintain its ability to compete on the global eco-nomic stage thus aiding its primary trading partners—the United States and Canada. This would also reduce migration pressures.

• Immigrant enterprise zones that are exempt from standard immigration quotas

• Broadening of the permanent visa sys-tem to reflect the real visa demands for labor and family reunification

• Revision of harmful policies on trade; crafting of meaningful international labor standards; and work with unions, corporations, and community organi-zations around the globe to promote better jobs, living standards, and stable communities everywhere.

Unless such steps are taken, the pressure for undocumented immigration will persist.

The Need for Immigrant WorkersUndocumented immigrants account for

about 4.3 percent of the civilian labor force—approximately 6.3 million work-ers out of a labor force of 146 million.1

Although they can be found in many different sectors of the economy, un-documented workers tend to be overrep-resented in certain occupations and in-dustries. They are much more likely to be in broad occupation groups that require little education or do not have licensing requirements.2 Three times as many un-documented immigrants work in agricul-ture, construction, and extraction as do U.S. citizens.3 In contrast, undocument-ed immigrants are conspicuously under-represented in white-collar occupations. While management, business, profes-sions, sales, and administrative support account for half of native citizen workers (52 percent), less than one-quarter of the undocumented workers are in these areas (23 percent).4

The undocumented workforce ought to be viewed in the context that the U.S. labor force will be decreasing in the foreseeable future due to demographic trends. There really is something to the pro-immigrant claim that immigrants are filling important job needs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce cites these data:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that the number of people in the labor force ages 25 to 34 is pro-jected to increase by only three mil-lion between 2002 and 2012, while those age fifty-five years and older will increase by 18 million. By 2012, those aged forty-five and older will have the fastest growth rate and will be a little more than 50% of the labor force. According to estimates . . . by the United Nations, the fertility rate in the United States is projected to fall below “replacement” level by 2015 to 2020, declining to 1.91 children per

c o n T e m P l a T i n g S o l U T i o n S 4 7

Cartoon appeared the day after the migrant-led protests of 2006. Cartoon by Fisgon, courtesy of La Jornada.

woman (lower than the 2.1 children per woman rate needed to replace the population). By 2010, 77 mil-lion baby boomers will retire and, by 2030, one in every five Americans is projected to be a senior citizen.

At the same time, we have, fortu-nately, projected job growth, includ-ing in lower-skilled occupations. Most jobs in our economy do not require a college degree. Close to 40% of all jobs require only short-term on-the-job training. In fact, of the top ten largest job growth occupations between 2002 and 2012, all but two require less than a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, six of the top ten occupations only require short-term on-the-job train-ing. Some of these top ten occupa-tions that only require short-term on-the-job training include: retail salespersons, nursing aides, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, and combined food preparation and serving workers. However, shortages of essential workers are not limited to the larg-est growth occupations. In fact, the need for essential workers cut across industry sectors. . . . BLS projected an increase in jobs be-tween 2002 and 2012 for roofers of over 30,000, while at the same time there would be attrition in this oc-cupation of about 40,000—a net deficit of 70,000. The Construction Labor Research Council issued a labor supply outlook . . . where it found that the industry would need 185,000 new workers annually for the next ten years. The National Restaurant Association projects that the restaurant industry

will add more than 1.8 million jobs between 2005 and 2015, an increase of 15%. However, the U.S. labor force is only projected to increase 12% during the next ten years, which will make it more challeng-ing than ever for restaurants to find the workers they need. . . . Our own surveys, not surprisingly, reflect the problems these employ-ers have in finding the workers that they need. . . . Difficulties in finding both entry-level and skilled workers, and developing solutions for this problem, ranked extremely high in importance to those surveyed.5

The Cato Institute concurs:While the fastest-growing occupa-tions in the next decade in percent-age terms will require high degrees of skill and education, the largest growth in absolute numbers will be in those categories that require only “short-term on-the-job training” of one month or less. In fact, of the top thirty categories with the larg-est expected growth between 2000 and 2010, more than half fall into that least-skilled category. . . . Those categories include: combined food preparation and servicing workers, including fast food; waiters and waitresses; retail salespersons; ca-shiers; security guards; nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants; janitors and cleaners; home health aides; manual laborers and freight, stock, and materials movers; landscaping and groundskeeping workers; and manual packers and packagers. . . . Across the U.S. economy, the La-bor Department estimates that the total number of jobs requiring only short-term training will increase from 53.2 million in 2000 to 60.9

million by 2010, a net increase of 7.7 million jobs. Meanwhile, the supply of Ameri-can workers suitable for such work continues to fall because of an aging workforce and rising education levels. The median age of American work-ers continues to increase as the large cohort of Baby Boomers approaches retirement age. From 1990 to 2010, the median age of U.S. workers is expected to increase from 36.6 years old to 40.6. Younger and older workers alike are now more educated as the share of adult native-born men without a high school diploma have

48 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

to “harmonizing” labor standards, in terms of wages, workweek, and other la-bor-cost factors.8 Economic development aid was provided to poorer countries like Spain and Portugal, to enhance broader economic opportunities throughout the region (and lessen pressure to migrate), although meeting labor needs through movement also was contemplated.9 In order to enhance mobility of workers, the European Social Fund provides vo-cational training and retraining. This fa-cilitates adaptation to business needs in different member countries.10 The idea is that to really integrate the member na-tions’ economies, the free movement of workers is necessary, and they should have the right to accept employment in any member nation.11 The workers’ fami-lies have the right to follow and establish new residence with the workers.12 The EU approach to labor migration has been thoughtful and deliberate. At the outset, leaders and planners knew that as open migration was contemplated a nec-essary underpinning was the reduction of economic difference between various regions of Europe. Beginning with the 1973 enlargement to include Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, the British pushed for an approach to aid poorer regions. When Greece (1981), Portugal (1986), and Spain (1986) were added, all three countries as well as Ire-land received infusions of capital and as-sistance with institutional planning. This shared-responsibility model was based on “a commitment to the values of in-ternal solidarity and mutual support.”13 The new member countries also enacted social legislation aimed at assisting the unemployed.14 The adhesion-fund approach worked. The gap between the poorer and richer nations narrowed. By the beginning of the new millennium, Ireland’s economy had transformed, and its per capita GDP was above the EU average. Incredibly, Ire-land—a country that for years had been a constant source of emigrants—began attracting immigrants. The feared “mass

Labor Movement in the European Union and Lessons for NAFTAIn contrast to the failure of NAFTA to incorporate labor migration in its pro-visions, the development of the EU has proceeded with the movement of work-ers clearly in mind. For that reason, looking to the European experience for guidance or even as a model is appeal-ing, especially given the sense that the EU permits open labor, engages in de-velopment assistance to poorer nations to reduce migration pressures, and yet maintains border control.7

Within the EU, a central component of economic integration is the mobility of persons. This is done with a commitment

plunged, from 53.6 percent in 1960 to 9.0 in 1998. During that same pe-riod, the share with college degrees has gone up from 11.4 percent to 29.8 percent. With the number of low-skilled jobs expected to grow by more than 700,000 a year, and a shrink-ing pool of Americans willing to fill those jobs, Mexican migrants provide a ready and willing source of labor to fill the growing gap be-tween demand and supply on the lower rungs of the labor ladder.6

Without a doubt, we need immigrant workers of all stripes.

Strawberry workers in Oxnard, most of whom are indigenous immigrants from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacan. Photo by David Bacon.

c o n T e m P l a T i n g S o l U T i o n S 4 9

lead to lack of confidence on the part of the public and even anti-immigrant sen-timent. More walls and fences are essen-tially an admission that the system is not working.22 And, curiously, restrictions on mobility curtail circularity, which can lead to the undocumented residing more permanently. Open borders enable mi-grants enter but to return as well.23

In his influential article on open borders,24 Kevin Johnson outlines the most salient points in support of a new way of looking at immigration. Under liberal theory, closed borders are an-tithetical to the rights of non-citizens; liberals ought to be supportive of “rela-tively unrestricted immigration.”25 The moral grounds to exclude “ordinary, peaceful people, seeking only the op-portunity to build decent secure lives” are simply hard to locate.26 Our reli-gious foundations also provide a “moral imperative” to treat immigrants in a humanitarian way.27

recognizes that migration has become part and parcel of the economy and so-cial life of countries, and that sending and receiving countries often become dependent on migration that is difficult to stop. In spite of that, the conven-tional wisdom is that an open border is not feasible because massive migration would result. But Pecoud submits that such fear is not grounded on any em-pirical understanding.18 We actually do not know what would happen if borders were opened, but we do know that the results of immigration policies are hard to predict.19 As the UNHCR has stated: “It may be assumed that, unless he seeks adventure or just wishes to see the world, a person would not normally abandon his home and country without some compelling reason.”20 And as we know from the EU experience, massive migra-tion from poorer countries does not oc-cur.21 Continued undocumented immi-gration flow and the apparent inability of a government to control the flow can

migration of the unemployed” fizzled. People stayed in their own countries be-cause work opportunities were created. Only 2 percent of EU citizens looked for work in other EU countries.15 The United States can learn from the successes of EU investments in candidate countries. Given the need to rethink the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. investment in Mexico must be part of the strategy. To begin, the United States should consider comprehensive funding that covers all areas of Mexico’s economy, as well as its social and political infrastructure. Such investments will ensure Mexican eco-nomic growth, as well as political and social stability and progress. The lesson of the EU is that with open trade, limits on the number of migrant workers are a mistake. Open migration of workers creates the most efficient la-bor market, allowing the flow of workers to properly follow job demand. In this way, workers remain above ground, earn-ing a protected wage and helping both the local and their home country econo-mies. Such an open border policy helps to guarantee workers’ rights and ensure that migrant workers are not doomed to substandard living conditions.

Considering Open Borders (Mi-gration without Borders)Many individuals have raised the idea of open borders for serious consideration. For example, after his landslide victory for the Mexican presidency in 2000, Vicente Fox advocated an open-border concept, acknowledging that Mexico could not of-fer its workers the same salaries or living standards offered in the United States but arguing that Mexican workers were able to fill much-needed job openings north of the border.16 Political philosophers such as Mark Tushnet, Joseph Carens, and R. George Wright have argued that restrict-ing law-abiding immigrants is antithetical to the notion of an open society.17

As if speaking about the U.S.-Mexico border specifically, Antoine Pecoud

An elderly man play songs from the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 for tips before crowds of migrants waiting for dawn in Altar, Sonora. Photo by John Gibler.

50 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

generation.42 In essence, the EU was able to reduce the volatility that would prey most heavily on weak economies. The key was to narrow the disparities in income between its rich and poor members.43 Investment was part of the NAFTA de-bates. President Clinton favored the establishment of a North American De-velopment Bank (NADBank). Resources were limited, however, and when the NA-DBank became operational, the mandate was limited to loans for environmental border projects.44 Furthermore, NAD-Bank’s mandate is to lend at market rates of interest for “sustainable” projects. Most Mexican communities cannot afford to take on the kind of debt needed to fund projects; there simply is no revenue to re-pay such loans, and charging higher utility rates to residents to fund is not possible.45 Mexico’s infrastructure needs attention. A national plan for infrastructure and transportation has not been developed.46 Reducing geographical disparities within Mexico would likely decrease pressures to emigrate, and a first priority should be improving the road system from the U.S. border to the central and southern parts of Mexico.47 If that were done, in-vestment could be attracted. The states of Oaxaca, Zacatecas, Michoacan, and Guanajuato, in the central and southern parts of the country, have the highest un-employment rates and are the primary sources of migrants to the border and to the United States.48 Yet, in spite of the growth in trade under NAFTA, signifi-cant investment in transportation and infrastructure has not occurred. Before NAFTA, Mexico invested in poorly de-signed toll roads under the Salinas ad-ministration (1988–94), and the roads charged hefty tolls that few were willing to pay. As Mexico’s debt rose, investment in infrastructure was slashed from about 10 percent in the 1980s to less than 2 percent in 1998. So all transportation sectors—roads, rail, air, and ports—face serious challenges.49 Taking a cue from the EU’s European Social Fund, Robert Pastor has made a

and Canada were opened. However we should not forget that the life-altering immigration decision is not made eas-ily, and a floodgate should not be the assumed response.35 Most undocu-mented workers from Mexico want to work in the United States tempo-rarily to finance projects back home, like building a house, purchasing land, buying consumer goods; if given the opportunity, they would work on tem-porary trips to the United States and retire back home to “enjoy the fruits of their labors in the United States.”36 Demographic changes also suggest some slowing of migration to the United States from Mexico over time. The Mexican birth rate is dropping, the population growth rate is lower, and fewer youngsters are approaching working age.37

Investing in MexicoEconomic development in Mexico is often cited as the real way to stop un-documented migration.38 The idea is that economic development would cre-ate more jobs, and the availability of more jobs would provide less reason for Mexicans to come to the United States to find work.39 The question is whether the idea would work, and what it would take to work. As noted in the EU experience, the estab-lishment of the European Social Fund ap-peared to moderate significant immigra-tion from poorer countries to wealthier nations and may be something to emu-late. For example, the fund boosted living standards in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland as they entered the EU.40 President Vicen-te Fox urged all three NAFTA countries (especially the United States) to contrib-ute to an analogous North American de-velopment fund, but the timing was bad, coming shortly before September 11, 2001.41 Among other things, the funds would have been used for highways to bridge the three countries better, for de-velopment in rural parts of Mexico, and to boost the Mexican education system in order to uplift opportunities for the next

In Johnson’s view, the special relationship between the United States and Mexico suggests a greater moral obligation to Mexican migrants.28 That relationship has led to a culture of migration from Mexico (built on economics and fam-ily reunification), and, as such, broad immigration restrictions are impossible to enforce because they run counter to migration pressures.29 Those restrictions have led to policies such as the institu-tion of Operation Gatekeeper and other militarization at the U.S.-Mexico border that has resulted in an untenable death toll among border crossers.30

Johnson observes that today’s immigra-tion laws contribute to racism in the United States, and their enforcement leads to civil rights harms.31 In con-tributing to an environment conducive to discriminatory sentiment, the cur-rent regime has led to a large pool of undocumented workers who are subject to exploitation by U.S. employers.32 There also are national security reasons for being more flexible in our approach to the border.33 More liberal admissions policies across our southern border would enhance our country’s security because we would know the identities of those who cross; resources currently wasted on border militarization could be spent on really ferreting out those who may be attempting to enter to do harm to the nation. Robert Pastor, di-rector of the Center for North Ameri-can Studies, also argues that NAFTA had a national security purpose that should not be neglected. The hope was to lesson migration pressures by sup-porting a stable Mexico. Thus he sub-mits that we should act to prevent a “serious internal crisis” in Mexico that could lead to massive migration; thus we should help Mexico, for example, to develop its natural gas and oil indus-tries for economic development as well as for security purposes.34 No one knows for sure what would happen if the borders with Mexico

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similar proposal. He believes that the three NAFTA countries should estab-lish an investment fund to invest in roads, telecommunications, and post-secondary education in Mexico.50 Re-call that the EU invested huge sums in roads and education in new, poorer, member states, narrowing their income gap with the rest of Europe, providing workers an incentive to stay home.51

Mexico lacks the capital to build the infrastructure that is necessary to help narrow the gap with Canada and the United States.52 Pastor argues that if its northern neighbors contributed 10 percent of what the EU spends on aid, with wise investments in infrastructure and education, Mexico could experience growth at a rate twice that of Canada and the United States. “The psychol-ogy of North America would change quickly, and the problems of immigra-tion, corruption, and drugs would look different. North America would have found the magic formula to lift devel-oping countries to the industrial world, and that would be the twenty-first-cen-tury equivalent of the shot heard round the world.”53 By building up the central part of the country, border congestion could be relieved, and the whole system could be better managed.54 Focusing on the educational system in Mexico is also key. Mexican students fall near the bottom in cross-country com-parisons on basic literacy, math, and sci-ence.55 While the adult education level in the United States is almost thirteen years, in Mexico, the level is about sev-en.56 This low education level has severe implications for competitiveness and standard of living for Mexicans, whether they remain in Mexico or migrate to the United States.57 Infusing new energy and investment in education in Mexico can bear fruit. Mexico’s “Progresa” or “Oportunidades” program gives poor families incentives to keep their children in school, pro-viding grants that are the equivalent of about two-thirds of what they would

earn working.58 About 2.5 million rural families received $1 billion through the program in 2000. The percentage of stu-dents that go from elementary school to high school has increased by 20 percent under the program.59 Other data indicate that Mexico is taking its responsibility to support education seriously. The average adult education level of seven years is up from three years twenty years ago.60 School enrollment for children (ages six to fourteen) reached 92.1 percent in 2000, compared to 85.8 percent in 1990 and 64.4 percent in 1970.61 Students are required to complete nine years of school and, in general, enrollment has increased more than 80 percent at the primary level.62 One thing that NAFTA has taught us is that if we expect employment growth in Mexico to materialize as a result of trade agreements, investments have to be tar-geted. We have to seriously determine how to help Mexico’s domestic industries, for example by using domestic parts and supplies in production exports.63 Local industries must be strengthened. In order for any significant effect on mi-gration from Mexico to take place, sig-nificant investment in new technologies in small- and medium-sized industries is a must. Some of this can be achieved through tax incentives to spur economic growth in the country’s interior. Fruit and vegetable production development can absorb some of the rural workers that have been displaced. And Mexico’s public infrastructure should be a big pri-ority. While open labor migration must be considered, Mexico’s future also must be kept in mind. Given what we now know about NAFTA as well as the recent po-litical-economic history of Mexico, we definitely need some flexibility at the border. Our special relationship with Mexico justifies that flexibility. However, setting up a system where Mexico loses large numbers of its able-bodied workers cannot be good for Mexico.

Consider the Mexican state of Zacatecas, a major source of labor migration to the United States. Some estimate that about a million dollars in remittances flow into the state each day. Yet local assembly plants had to close for lack of workers.64 An open border could hurt Mexico psy-chologically as well. Workers could focus more on their plan to leave Mexico, than on how to use their talents in Mexico.65 Mexican migrants are among the coun-try’s most able workers, who leave for better wages—not necessarily because they are unemployed. Their income in the United States is better than what they were making in Mexico but it is unclear if the productivity—measured in part by their remittance—is higher than what it would have been if they had remained in Mexico. That is a hard question to answer, so an open border does not nec-essarily mean that Mexico benefits.66 By concentrating on investments in Mexico to create more jobs, even if labor move-ment is opened up, fewer than expected Mexicans would migrate, because incen-tives for able Mexican workers to remain home will have been created.

Immigrant Enterprise ZonesIn spite of tensions over immigration that have arisen in some communities, certain areas of the United States regard immigration as an answer to regional economic problems. They understand that immigrant workers have been ex-tremely beneficial to many parts of the country. Thus, efforts are under way in many regions to recruit more immi-grants. Iowa is one example. Like states and cities in other regions of the country, a considerable part of Iowa’s popula-tion has disappeared over the past two decades. A large portion of its high school graduates leaves the state each year shortly after graduation. But even if Iowa were able to retain every high school senior after graduation, Iowa would still face a 3 percent decline in its adult workforce within five years.

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sources of labor find other jobs or remain in school. Initially, migrant workers ar-rived in Kentucky to cut tobacco on their swing through the country before head-ing home for the winter. They became invaluable when other workers could not be found. Kentucky’s chief demographer put it a little differently, as he recognizes immigrant labor as a hedge against the graying of Kentucky: “I don’t think we’re going to have an indigenous labor force. Boomers are done having kids. The boomlet is over.”67 Louisville officials also want to attract immigrants. The city’s population fell 5 percent in the 1990s and would have dropped more had it not been for the approximately twenty thousand immigrants and refugees from places like Cuba, Somalia, and Vietnam during the decade. A new city office of international and cultural affairs plans to post a list of interpreters on the Internet for community service providers to use. Efforts to help immigrants establish their own businesses are also underway.

Broaden the Permanent Visa SystemThe U.S. immigration system requires comprehensive reform that serves every-one who lives and works in the United States. The country’s outdated immigra-tion policy is incapable of dealing with twenty-first-century immigration pat-terns and economic realities. In effect, it undermines the very ideals and values the country was built on and serves neither business nor workers. Each year, approximately five hundred thousand immigrants—the majority without authorization status—are ab-sorbed into the U.S. labor force. These numbers will continue to burgeon until U.S. immigration laws are reformed to adequately address the global economic realities of the twenty-first century. Given the risks, why do migrants from Mexico continue the harrowing trek? The attraction of the United States is ob-vious. The strong economy pays Mexican workers, for example, eight to nine times

Many Philadelphia leaders believe that the city must act to maintain its residen-tial base and explore ways to attract resi-dents from other regions of the country and from around the world. They believe that this is critical for revitalizing many neighborhoods in addition to increasing local tax revenues. Their plan includes:• Assisting immigrants in finding hous-

ing and health services• Working with local colleges and uni-

versities in Philadelphia (the city has developed an overall recruitment plan for foreign students to help increase the foreign student population)

• Working with the major technological and e-commerce business entities in the city to develop a comprehensive plan to recruit highly educated and skilled workers

• Through the school district, working to ensure that the children of immigrants are enrolled in school and are offered language classes and assimilation ser-vices, and expanding the curriculum to require all native-born students to study a second language

• Through the Office of New Philadel-phians, developing a comprehensive plan on how new immigrants can help to contribute to the positive redevel-opment of distressed neighborhoods.

Not to be outdone across the state, Pitts-burgh is also embracing new strategies to attract immigrants. While Philadelphia was losing 4 percent of its population in the 1990s, Pittsburgh’s population fell by 9.5 percent. Local organizations have received foundation grants to help attract immigrants with jobs, encourage foreign students to stay after graduation, and teach the community about diver-sity. The city hopes to remake its out-dated smoky image, in order to attract immigrants to thousands of jobs in new health-care, biotechnology, and comput-er software industries. Kentucky is a state whose reliance on immigrants appears to be understood in similar terms. Farmers have come to depend on immigrants when native

Iowa also ranks third in the nation for elderly citizens; an average Iowa farmer is fifty-eight years old and the average assembly-line worker at the Maytag Company in Newton, Iowa, is fifty-sev-en. Iowa’s loss of its young homegrown population comes at a time when the state has enjoyed a vibrant and growing economy the past decade, with annual unemployment of only 2 percent. Iowa’s farms employ fewer workers than ever; its population is aging, at a time when it needs younger workers and the state wants to attract high-tech industries. As Iowa is losing people, it wants immi-grants to replace them. A bipartisan state commission, established when Tom Vil-sack was governor, is composed of thirty-seven prominent Iowans. Its mandate was to devise a plan to improve the state’s economy by the year 2010. Having set their economic goals, members realized the state did not have the population to meet them. This “2010 Commission” concluded that Iowa’s population needed to increase about 10 percent by 2010. Some of its recommendations:

• Make Iowa technologically competitive by developing non-agricultural indus-tries

• Establish “diversity welcome centers” to help immigrants locate housing, learn English, and find health care

• Designate Iowa an “immigrant enter-prise zone” and seek a federal exemp-tion from immigration quotas

• Assist Iowa companies to recruit pro-spective employees from abroad.

The city of Philadelphia faces similar challenges. During the past decade, the city lost over 68,000 residents—about 4 percent of its population. This contin-ued a downward trend in the population that began in the late 1950s. As more and more residents depart—primarily middle-income residents looking for bet-ter schools and safe neighborhoods—the city faces a further erosion of its already shrinking tax base and potential reduc-tions in its federal dollar allocation.

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Lawmakers must choose to revise harmful policies on trade, to craft meaningful in-ternational labor standards, and to work with unions, corporations, and com-munity organizations around the globe to promote better jobs, living standards, and stable communities everywhere, oth-erwise the pressure for undocumented immigration will persist. We can craft trade policies in an era of globalization while respecting the rights and dignity of working people and their families throughout the world. Too often, when companies in search of cheap wages and weak labor laws cannot export jobs, they import workers to cre-ate a domestic pool of exploitable labor, effectively importing the labor standards of developing nations into the United States. Immigration reform must provide meaningful and enforceable penalties for companies that violate health, safety, and labor laws, regardless of the status of their workforce. The resources and investigative authority of the U.S. De-partment of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be expanded to allow for the consistent, coordinated, and adequate enforcement of health, safety, and labor laws.

ConclusionThe debate over trade and migration needs to be reframed. We need to un-derstand that NAFTA and similar agree-ments have had tremendous influence on migration pressures from Mexico. We must understand that Mexico requires infrastructure and economic assistance. We need to be open to a new vision of the border and labor migration. In short, we need to stand back, take a careful look at the challenges, and craft solutions that will be beneficial to both the United States and Mexico.

that the economic incentives are in place for U.S. employers to hire U.S. workers first. Businesses should be required to search widely for workers already in the U.S. and wage rate requirements should be high enough to make jobs attractive to U.S. workers. Access to the program should be frozen in areas with high unem-ployment, and the employer application fees for hiring new foreign workers under the program should be significant. This approach would satisfy employers’ needs for workers. More importantly, it would prevent the creation of an underclass of workers since immigrants would have full employment rights and access to a per-manent future in the U.S. community, economy, and democracy.

Additionally, under the current visa pro-gram, families often have to wait five to twenty years to be reunited with their family members. The visa limits and structural delays must be revamped to end the separation of families and reduce the number of undocumented immi-grants entering the country. At the end of the day, family reunification must remain a high priority to be fair to the workers that we need and recruit.

Revise Harmful Policies on Trade and Craft Meaningful Labor StandardsEconomic globalization and harmful U.S. trade policies are at the root of our failed immigration system. U.S. trade policies have consequences for workers around the world. Thirteen years of NAFTA have resulted in the loss of millions of U.S. jobs. In Mexi-co, real wages have declined by 20 per-cent, millions of farmers have been dis-located, and millions more consigned to poverty, fueling the labor flight into the United States.

more than what they can earn in Mexico. For many, it is a matter of economic des-peration, and some observers think that migrants would continue to come even if we mined the border. In a sense, they do not have a choice. Besides, jobs are plen-tiful here, because a variety of industries rely on low-wage migrant workers. The migrants may know the risks but figure that the risks are outweighed by the ben-efits of crossing.

Motivations for continued migration call into question the effectiveness of build-ing more walls or expanding Operation Gatekeeper if the goal is to discourage border crossers. Beyond the economic situation in Mexico, a socio-economic phenomenon is at play. The phenom-enon involves the long, historical travel patterns between Mexico and the United States, coupled with the interdependency of the two regions. Migration from Mex-ico is the manifestation of these econom-ic problems and social phenomena. The militarization of the border does nothing to address these. Instead, it traumatizes individuals who are caught up in them. Instead of short-term “guest worker” vi-sas, labor shortages should be filled with workers with full rights, a path to per-manent residence, and, if they choose, citizenship. Congress has arbitrarily set the number of employment-based ad-missions for permanent visas at one hun-dred forty thousand visas annually. This number falls far short of satisfying the actual need for visas based on the U.S. de-mand for labor and family reunification. The number of visas available should respond to actual, demonstrated labor shortages. The new visa program must ensure that U.S. workers are the first ones to be considered for available jobs and

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Jeffrey S. Passel, 1. Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Charac-teristics (Washington DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2005), http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/46.pdf.Ibid.2. Ibid.3. Ibid.4. The Need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Serving Our 5. National Economy, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Im-migration, Border Security and Citizenship of the Senate Com-mittee on the Judiciary, 109th Congress 3–5 (2005) (statement of Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce).Daniel T. Griswold, “Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of 6. Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States,” Cato Institute, Center for Trade Policy Study 19 (October 15, 2002), http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/pas/tpa-019.pdf.Jason Ackleson, “Achieving ‘Security and Prosperity’: Migra-7. tion and North American Economic Integration,” Immigration Policy in Focus 4, no. 2, (2006), 1.Jennifer E. Harman, 8. Mexican President Vicente Fox’s Proposal for Expanding NAFTA into a European Union-Style Common Market—Obstacles and Outlook, Law and Business Review of the Americas (2001): 207, 216.Ackleson, 4-5.9. Bradly J. Condon & J. Brad McBride, “Do You Know the 10. Way to San Jose? Resolving the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 17 (2003): 251, 291.Christopher J. Cassise, “The European Union v. the United 11. States under the NAFTA: A Comparative Analysis of the Free Movement of Persons within the Regions,” Syracuse Law Review 46, (1996): 1343, 1349.Ibid., 1354.12. Robert Pastor, 13. Toward a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2001): 29. Pastor, 55, 81.14. Jeff Faux, 15. The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite List Our Future—And What it will Take to Win it Back (Hobo-ken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006): 224.Ginger Thompson, “Mexican Leader Visits U.S. with a Vision 16. to Sell,” New York Times, August 24, 2000. Mark Tushnet, “Immigration Policy in Liberal Political Theo-17. ry,” Justice in Immigration, ed. Warren F. Schwartz, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 147, 155; Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Re-view Policy, 49 (1987): 251, 270; R. George Wright, “Federal Immigration Law and the Case for Open Entry,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 27 (1994): 1265, 1266. Antoine Pecoud, 18. Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007): 1, 4. Ibid., 13.19.

Ibid. 20. Ibid.21. Ibid., 6.22. Ibid., 14. In fact, in the United States, stricter border enforce-23. ment after 9/11 has reduced circularity, and many undocu-mented people who would regularly return home no longer feel that they can do so. In many respects, this has increased the undocumented population.Kevin R. Johnson, “Open Borders?” UCLA Law Review 51 24. (2003): 193. See generally, Kevin R. Johnson, Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink its Borders and Im-migration Laws (New York: NYU Press, 2007). Johnson, 205 (citing Mark Tushnet).25. Ibid., 208 (citing Joseph Carens).26. Ibid., 205–6.27. Ibid., 230–32.28. Ibid., 244–52.29. Ibid., 221–22.30. Ibid., 216–17. Consider racist sentiment directed at Latinos 31. in the United States and the increased discrimination and hate crimes directed at Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians after 9/11. Ibid., 226–30.32. Bill Ong Hing, Deporting Our Souls—Values, Morality and 33. Immigration Policy (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2006): 158. Pastor, 189.34. Johnson, 208 (citing Dowty).35. Douglas S. Massey, “An Exercise in Self-Deception,” 36. Newsweek, January 19, 2004.“Northward, Ho! Fox and Bush,” 37. Economist, August 31, 2001.Kevin R. Johnson, “Free Trade and Closed Borders: NAFTA 38. and Mexican Immigration to the United States,” U.C. Davis Law Review 27 (1994): 937, 960 (citing Congressman Robert Matsui).Mexico and the Migration Phenomenon,39. Embassy of Mexico, distributed at MPI Immigration Task Force meeting (Washing-ton, DC, February 28, 2006): 2, 6.Harman, 220.40. Ibid.41. Ibid.42. Pastor, 9.43. Ibid., 76.44. Ibid., 77.45. Ibid., 93.46. Ibid., 137.47. Ibid.48. Ibid., 93.49. Ibid., 136. 50. Thomas L. Friedman, “Out of the Box,”51. New York Times, April 4, 2004.Pastor, 145.52. Ibid., 191.53.

notes

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Ibid., 139.54. Condon & McBride, 255.55. Ibid.56. Ibid., 267.57. Ibid., 267–68.58. Ibid.59. Ibid., 256.60. Ibid.61. Pastor, 141. Portugal and Spain, with EU help, established 62. small colleges in rural provinces. These colleges served as mag-nets that attracted professionals from more advanced regions, and they also radiated their influence into the wider rural com-munity, helping to upgrade their education. Ibid.,141.Sandra Polaski, 63. NAFTA at Year Twelve, Oral Testamony at the United States Senate Subcommittee on International Trade of

the Committee on Finance, Sept. 11, 2006, Carnegie Endow-ment for International Peace, www.carnegieendowment.org/files/naftaoraltestimony.pdf. Pastor, 125.64. Ibid. As long as incomes in the United States range from four 65. to thirty times those in Mexico, the incentives to migrate will be compelling. Until that differential can be reduced by about half—and, under very optimistic projections, that could take thirty to forty years—a deliberate decision to relax U.S. im-migration laws would have serious adverse consequences for Mexico’s economy. Ibid., 126.66. Butch John, “Immigration’s Local Impact: Hispanics, Asians 67. Flowing In; Their Growth is Eight Times That of Whole Popu-lation,” Louisville Courier, September 6, 2000.

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migRaTion anD DeveloPmenT: moving beyonD nafTa

oScaR chacón anD amy Shannon

Framing migrants as key social actors who comprise a transnational constitu-ency with an important role in defining a new approach to regional integration, Shannon and Chacon propose ways in which Mexican immigrants can leverage their experiences and emerging political clout to achieve more sustainable and people-centered North American devel-opment. They present an overview of mi-grants’ diverse roles, detailing their eco-nomic, social, and cultural contributions to both receiving and sending countries. Emphasizing the paucity of policymaker consultation with migrant populations, Shannon and Chacon describe the exclu-sion of migrant perspectives from trade and immigration policy discussions. The policy proposals Shannon and Chacon offer include the establishment of strin-gent human and labor rights standards, acknowledgement and mitigation of so-cial asymmetries between potential trade partners prior to signing trade agreements, and investment in environmental protec-tion and education to meet the challenges of a globalized world.

IntroductionAll over the hemisphere, governments are struggling with an uncomfortable reality. Although increased trade has brought economic growth in some sec-tors, growth has not translated into increased economic opportunities for many of the region’s poor people. To the contrary, many countries in Latin Amer-ica are experiencing dramatic increases in economic inequality, with the poorest of the poor at the losing end of the equa-tion. A recent World Bank briefing paper suggested that while trade liberalization may drive growth, it tends to concentrate wealth and may have the unintended ef-fect of exacerbating poverty.1 Over the past fourteen years since Mexico, Cana-da, and the United States signed NAFTA,

the promises of regional integration still ring hollow for most Mexicans and for many other Americans. During the debate about NAFTA in the early 1990s, proponents argued that the trade agreement would slow migra-tion, beef up tri-national environmen-tal protections, and create new jobs for all. The experiences of the past decade have proved quite different. In spite of increasingly harsh border restrictions, millions of Mexicans have fled sput-tering rural economies to seek work in the United States. The dominant role of China in world manufacturing strongly suggests that Mexico is not going to make economic leaps forward through low-cost labor and simple maquila manufacturing. The lure of the econo-my on the U.S. side of the border, with its strong demand for agricultural work-ers, service employees, meat and poultry processors, and other manual labor jobs, is pulling us ever more quickly into an integrated hemispheric labor market, a reality not contemplated under NAFTA. At the same time, working-class people in the United States have witnessed a constant erosion of their quality of life. Millions lack access to health care, send their children to substandard schools, and struggle to make a living wage. The social ills of unchecked economic glo-balization have a strikingly similar ap-pearance across the hemisphere. As we look back at nearly fifteen years un-der NAFTA, we should ask policy mak-ers hard questions about the purported benefits of export-oriented, growth-at-all-costs trade agreements. Perhaps more importantly, we should begin to craft policies that respond to the realities of our increasingly globalized world and put people-centered sustainable devel-opment at the center of our agenda. It

is high time to break out of the policy silos that separate migration from its root cause, which is the lack of sustainable de-velopment, and to seek policy solutions that recognize the degree to which our future well-being is already deeply depen-dent on that of our neighbors. We also must engage migrants and their families as key social actors who comprise a trans-national constituency in a new approach to regional integration.

Policy Silos: Migration and its Root CausesThe question of human mobility across borders is deliberately omitted under the NAFTA model of trade and economic integration, despite the obvious connec-tions between profound economic and production shifts and migration. In con-tradiction our national debate around immigration policy in the United States consistently ignores the fundamental question of why people find it necessary to leave their homelands in the first place. As politicians debate the relative merits of border security and militarization, earned legalization, and enforcement, little attention is paid to what drives migration from Mexico and around the world: deep inequalities, insecurity, and lack of opportunity. If we are to develop policies that will lead to long-term sustainable develop-ment in our hemisphere and provide economic opportunities for people in their own communities, we must rec-ognize the interconnected nature of fac-tors that are causing so many people to leave their places of origin in search of a better life in another country. Current patterns of economic globalization and technology have both increased pres-sures to migrate and made it easier to do so. The economic push and pull factors for migration are amplified by increased

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homogenization of cultural expectations, driven by global media communications conglomerates and fueled by television and the consumer culture of the north. Migration continues to be driven as well by the healthy human impulse to reunite families. Migration will remain a sig-nificant factor in the economic, cultural, and political future of our hemisphere for the foreseeable future. Rather than denying it, we should focus on ways to leverage the experiences and emerging political clout of migrants toward a more sustainable and people-focused vision for our hemisphere.

Transnational Community Orga-nizations: Current and Potential RolesOver the past two decades, as immigrants have arrived in the United States from Latin America in record numbers, many new organizations have formed within im-migrant communities. These organizations have diverse expressions. Some of them provide community services to newly ar-rived immigrant communities. Others emerged in the wake of natural disasters to funnel charitable donations to the affected regions. In some cases organizations form from existing or newly developed social connections—groups of migrants get to-gether to play soccer or meet others from their community and end up forming an organization to help out in their old home-town or solve a problem in their new one. In general, first-generation Latino immigrant leaders, who have firsthand experience of the impacts—both good and bad—of the changing global economy, form these civic and community-based groups.

Many recently arrived Latino immigrants tend to organize around some aspect of ethnic or national affinity. In the case of immigrants from Mexico, the self-orga-nized immigrant groups often revolve

around a particular town or region of origin. This has led academics to call them Hometown Associations (HTAs), though they most often call themselves “clubs” or “committees.” In the case of Central Americans, the organizations often have a more national or ethnic bent. For ex-ample, Centro Romero in Chicago, Cen-tral American Resource Center in Hous-ton, and Centro Presente in Boston all trace their history to a committed group of Salvadoran émigrés who organized to support the burgeoning refugee commu-nity that began arriving from El Salvador during the war in the 1980s. The strong sense of local or national identity that propels immigrant organizing does not mean that the organizations cannot form alliances with others when circumstances require it. The National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) coordinates national and in-ternational-level advocacy efforts of more than seventy-five community-based, Lati-no-immigrant-led organizations around the country, on issues ranging from im-migration reform to civic engagement and sustainable development. Latino and Caribbean immigrants and their organizations already play a strong and visible role in their countries of ori-gin, and are beginning to assume a more visible role in the United States. Among other things, immigrants are:

• Pumping a lot of money into local economies in Latin America. Even as they build their communities here in the United States, Latino immigrants have continued to care about and support their communities in their countries of origin. Migrants are only too aware that the lack of economic opportunity in the home country is a key driver of migration. Some Mexi-can hometown associations now have

more than a decade of experience in infrastructure investment and collec-tive charitable donations in communi-ties of origin. In recent years, some mi-grant organizations have begun to take a more aggressive role in pressing for development policies that create jobs and economic opportunity in their places of origin.

• Providing services in communities of arrival to help immigrants integrate more fully into the social, economic, political, and cultural fabric of soci-ety. These services include: English-language training, vocational training, computer training, civic participation, financial literacy, after-school care, youth organizing, health services, and cultural preservation—dance, music, theater, etc..

• Becoming more visible advocates for political changes in the United States. One of the striking aspects of large im-migrant mobilizations in the spring of 2006 was the degree to which im-migrant-led, locally based organizing drove the process. The larger national organizations, including labor unions, lagged behind local communities in grasping the potential to channel popular unrest into large, visible pub-lic actions. In the wake of the 2006 marches, many immigrant-led organi-zations have continued and deepened their engagement in immigration re-form advocacy.

• Pressing for political changes in coun-tries of origin. Until recently, actions in this area have tended to coalesce around civil rights, including the right to vote and the right to politi-cal representation. In 2006, Mexican immigrant activists finally won a long-standing battle to allow Mexicans liv-ing abroad to vote in federal elections. Unfortunately, the Byzantine “vote-by-mail” process made it difficult for

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based organizations that form the NAL-ACC have engaged in a policy dialogue related to promoting long-term, sustain-able development. Emerging from this dialogue, the following ideas could be a first step in moving toward a new ap-proach to regional integration and devel-opment in our hemisphere.

• Recognize the urgent need to modify the trade and development policies that the United States has pursued in Latin America for the past twenty years. Cur-rent policies have largely failed to lift the majority of people out of poverty and have deepened economic inequal-ity in the region. Instead of moving forward with more ill-conceived trade agreements, U.S. development assis-tance policies should strengthen local economies and lay the groundwork for long-term, sustainable development. The collapse of rural economies is one factor driving people to migrate. Given the importance of local agricul-tural production to the livelihoods of many Latin Americans, we should give priority to building strong local and regional markets and environmental sustainability by revising U.S. subsi-dies to agricultural production.

• The United States must move forward with immigration reform. As long as tens of millions of people live in fear at the margins of society, they will con-tinue to be effectively blocked from being fully productive and civically engaged members of society. A sen-sible, workable immigration reform must include a path to legal perma-nent residency, with a prompt and fair citizenship option for those who already live, work, and raise families in the United States. It must also deal with the shocking backlogs, some stretching over a decade, for family re-unification petitions. Finally we must come to terms with the reality that more workers from abroad will flow into our economy over time. We need a set of rules that will support the full protection of these workers’ human and labor rights, and allow those who

Although dwarfed in comparison to the amount of individual remittances received, collective remittances used as donations or for project investment are also on the rise, as migrant organizations consolidate and develop more ambitious agendas aimed at influencing the trajec-tory of their hometowns. However, more and more migrants are seeing their ef-forts thwarted by the broader economic context, including the emphasis on the export-driven development model codi-fied in NAFTA. Migrant investors are frustrated by the lack of a supportive economic policy context for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. Credit, es-pecially in rural areas, is both hard to get and expensive. Technical and marketing assistance is virtually nonexistent. Many migrants have tried to invest in sectors they know, such as agriculture, but find themselves outcompeted by larger-scale, subsidized operations in the United States that are able to use the privileges afforded by NAFTA to dump products on the Mexican market. Many migrant-led organizations are asking hard ques-tions about the best way for migrant investment to create long-term economic opportunities in places of origin.4 Over the past two years, the community-

many voters to register but the trend toward absentee voting has pushed down to the state level.

Beyond Remittances: Immigrants as a Constituency for Sustain-able, People-centered Develop-ment PoliciesOften, discussion of migrants’ roles in development in their countries of origin devolves to a relatively simplistic focus on remittances. Certainly, the aggregate numbers are impressive. But taken one at a time, these private transfers that have captured the imaginations of govern-ments and multilateral agencies average less than $500 per month per family.

According to the Inter-American Devel-opment Bank (IADB), more than $300 billion will flow into Latin America in the next ten years from family remittances.2 To get a sense of the relative magnitude of these transfers, it is worth noting that total remittances have come to match or surpass total foreign direct investment across the region, and in some countries, remittances far outpace FDI as a percentage of GDP.3 According to IADB data, Mexico received about $24 billion in remittances in 2007, eclipsing all sources except petroleum in the generation of foreign exchange.

“Of course we are indignant! It’s one remittance less!” “SRE” is the Spanish acronym for Mexico’s foreign Ministry. Cartoon by Magu, courtesy of La Jornada.

m i g R a T i o n a n D D e v e l o P m e n T 5 9

young people for the demands of the twenty-first century. Our schools are failing to meet the needs of a global-ized world. Our education system is failing both immigrants and native-born students, particularly within racial minorities. Key skill sets that our country should be nurturing, such as multi-lingual capabilities and multi-cultural competencies are be-ing squandered as a result. We live in a de facto regional labor market. We should be working together with our neighbors, including Canada, Mexico,

pealing as a potentially renewable en-ergy source, large-scale agribusiness monoculture for biofuel may turn out to be just as (or more) damaging to the planet from a global warming perspec-tive. The damage to local food systems by large-scale conversion to fuel crops should also be a cause for alarm. Al-though NAFTA set up a tri-national facility for addressing environmental issues, the entity has been perpetually underfunded and lacks a meaningful enforcement mechanism.

• Invest in education that will prepare

end up working for several years in the United States the right to apply for le-gal permanent residency status.

• Because all the countries in our hemi-sphere are now experiencing migra-tion in ever more complicated dynam-ics, we should work across borders to establish minimum standards of treatment for migrants in sending, receiving, and transit countries. These standards should be based on the prin-ciples of respect for human rights and human dignity. Migration should be decriminalized in all countries as a first step toward reducing the extreme vulnerability of migrants to exploita-tion and abuse.

• In addition to reassessing our economic policy approach over the longer term, immediate steps should be taken to address the economic asymmetries that drive migration, including:

• A moratorium on new bilateral or multilateral trade agreements without taking into account the significant asymmetries between the U.S. econ-omy and the economies of potential partner countries, and building in ap-propriate compensatory mechanisms, as well as protections for labor and the environment. Immigrant-led as-sociations can and should be a part of a national dialogue to rethink the way in which trade relations should be re-defined and implemented.

• Enabling poor families to build assets by increasing access to appropriate fi-nancial services for immigrants with-out access to banking services in the United States and for their families in countries of origin. This will require investment in innovative, appropriate financial technology such as bination-ally linked credit and other commu-nity financial institutions.

• We must engage our neighbors in shared strategy for dealing with environmental challenges, including climate change, water management, and pollution. There will be no silver bullets to magi-cally solve these problems. The recent flurry of interest in biofuels should serve as a cautionary tale. While ap-

A group of recently deported migrants line up to be searched by police before being admit-ted into a private shelter that provides a free meal, blanket and serves as a contractor for

local maquiladoras. Photo by John Gibler.

60 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

local cultures and peoples’ sense of pride about their own identity. The mean-ing of successful ways of life should be pluralistic, rather than Hollywood-man-ufactured. Ultimately we must strive to significantly decrease the profound so-cial and economic asymmetries between peoples in rich nations in North America and Europe on one hand, and peoples in developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America on the other. If people do not see any hope for their children in their places of origin, migration will continue to be the only option for many families around the world.

“race to the bottom” in wages, labor pro-tections and environmental protections, all while extracting record-breaking prof-it margins that become ever more con-centrated in fewer pockets in the United States and abroad. A policy framework for lasting changes must prioritize sustainable, local eco-nomic development, placing a priority on building small- and medium-sized enterprises and creating opportunities for meaningful, dignified work. The collapse of rural economies is one key factor driv-ing people to migrate, so we must pay at-tention to developing healthy rural econ-omies. It will also be crucial to strengthen

and countries in Central America and the Caribbean, on vital issues such as workforce development strategies for equitable and sustainable economic growth with universal benefits.

Final ThoughtsThe trade and development policies em-bodied in NAFTA have failed to lift the majority of people out of poverty and have deepened economic inequality in many countries. Proponents of “free trade” as the antidote to poverty may have had the best of intentions but it just hasn’t worked. Unfortunately, many corporations have seized the opportunity to exploit trade agreements as they lead a

“Does More International Trade Openness Increase World Poverty?” World Bank Briefing Paper, http://www1.worldbank.org/econom-1. icpolicy/globalization/documents/AssessingGlobalizationP2.pdf.”Sending Money Home,” Inter-American Development Bank, http://www.iadb.org/mif/remesas_map.cfm?language=English&parid=5&2. item1d=2Foreign Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean 2004,3. United Nations ECLAC, 2005. For more detail on migrant-led dialogue on sustainable development, see Raúl Delgado Wise and Héctor Rodríguez Ramírez , “The 4. Emergence of Collective Migrants and Their Role in Mexico’s Local and Regional Development,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 22, no. 3 (2001), http://www.migracionydesarrollo.org; Rodolfo García Zamora, “Migración Internacional y Desarrollo Local: Una Propuesta Binacional para el Desarrollo Regional del Sur de Zacatecas,” Red Internacional de Migración y Dessarollo, http://www.migracionydesarrollo.org; Amy Shannon, “Investing in Hope: Transnational Communities as Social and Political Entrepreneurs,” Enlaces América, http://www.enlacesamerica.org/articles0303/newsletters/edition10Fall2005/InvestingInHope.htm

notes

m i g R a T i o n a n D D e v e l o P m e n T 6 1

Calexico, California, USA. June 2004. This canal hugs the boundary between the United States and Mexico.Photo by Mizue Aizeki.

62 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

PoliTical violence anD migRaTion in The loWeR TRiqUi Region

maRía DoloReS PaRíS Pombo

The author offers a ground-level perspec-tive on the forces reshaping the lives of the indigenous Triqui nation and propelling their migration from Oaxaca to northwest-ern Mexico and the United States. Owning fertile lands but standing at the bottom of the social and political system has made the Triqui the target of systematic attempts by authoritarian state officials and their allies to deprive them of their livelihoods, often violently. Economic hardship, imposed by the vagaries of commodity prices under globalization, made the Triqui easy prey for agribusiness labor contractors, who first hooked them to work in northwestern Mex-ico. Since then, the Triqui have dispersed throughout North America, working as ag-ricultural laborers following the crop cycle, and learning to organize transnationally to defend their rights and their traditions. However the same process of adaptation poses new challenges for an ancient culture, and the outcome still hangs in the balance.

IntroductionThe Lower Triqui region lies on the west-ern part of the state of Oaxaca, at the in-tersection of the Upper and Lower Mix-teca Sierras. Fifty years ago, the region’s main town, San Juan Copala, stopped being a county seat and become an agen-cy of Santiago Juxtlahuaca. International migration in this region is relatively re-cent. Thirty years ago, migratory work was a domestic and seasonal undertaking that served to complement monetary in-comes from the sale of coffee, bananas, and the beautiful garments woven by Triqui women on waist-held looms. Back then, agribusiness bosses from the state of Sinaloa, wishing to reap higher profits in their new export horticulture planta-tions, started hiring workers directly in the poorest and most isolated parts of the Mixteca, eventually fostering family and communal migration to northwest-ern Mexico. Later, migrant networks

substituted the “labor hooking” system. Political violence and insecurity in their original lands pushed the Triqui to stay in the northwest and to migrate across the border in search of better living con-ditions. Thus Triqui migration is shaded by political exile and at the same time responds to the development model in-stituted in Mexico a quarter of a century ago. In addition to drops in the price of commercial crops, such as coffee, and the total absence of rural development poli-cies, migration is fed by generalized vio-lence stemming from territorial disputes and the struggle for political control of the region.

Disputed TerritorySurrounded by forests, traversed by small rivers, and fed by abundant rain, the Lower Triqui lands are fertile. A palette of green colors the landscape. Yams, herbs, and wild roots grow on the hillsides and are part of the daily diet of the popula-tion. Until the 1970s, the Triqui lived by planting maize for self-consumption, by picking wild roots, and by growing fruit trees, including mangoes, mameyes, oranges, and guava, in small family land-holdings. The production and sale of traditional garments and the commer-cial sale of coffee and bananas sufficed to earn enough income to buy industrialized products and to pay for school supplies or celebrations. Coffee was grown in small plots, with primitive techniques and a much lower productivity than that of the Putla valley coffee growers.1 However, lo-cal intermediaries and hoarders consid-ered coffee a source of great wealth, since they bought cheap, often in advance or in exchange for hard liquor and guns, and sold at higher prices in regional markets. In order to control grain production and keep their margins high, these merchants disrupted the creation of alternative mar-kets or coffee mills, often violently.2

The land’s fertility and bounty have been a permanent source of conflict. Triqui lands have been repeatedly invaded or fought over by mestizo ranchers and Mixtecs from nearby towns. Despite the struggle to enforce their property rights, between 1970 and 1990 the Triqui lost 33 percent of their land, while their population grew 49 percent.3 As a result, smallholdings were divided even more and massive emigration ensued. Starting in the 1980s, continuous con-frontations between caciques and popu-lar organizations spurred emigration. In particular, corrupt popular leaders, the authoritarian and repressive state government, its mestizo rancher allies, and indigenous caciques allied with the Partido Revolucionario Institu-cional and the Triqui Unification and Struggle Movement (MULT) fanned political conflicts. From the creation of the MULT in 1981 to the close of the century, eight hundred Triqui suc-cumbed to political violence.4 These deaths are fundamentally related to the institutional vacuum: absent are not only the agrarian authorities but also the judiciary, which compounds impunity. Lastly, since the 1990s, the creation of paramilitary groups tied to party and governmental interests made shootings, ambushes, murders, vendet-tas, and armed conflicts ordinary occur-rences. Vendettas and murders are also common among members of the same organization, as they seek to control the resources and power of the move-ment. Since the 2003 creation of the Partido de Unidad Popular (PUP) un-der the auspices of then-governor José Murat, the rise of internal dissent in the movement helped violence flare up. In 2006, the movement splintered and the MULT-Independiente came into being. This organization participated

P o l i T i c a l v i o l e n c e a n D m i g R a T i o n 6 3

with two other ones, until recently tied to the PRI—Unidad de Bienestar Social de la Región Triqui (UBISORT) and Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC)—in the creation of the autono-mous municipality of San Juan Copala in 2007. The MULT-I participated in the massive protests led by the Popu-lar Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) that rocked the state of Oaxaca in 2006.

The new municipality is governed under the “Traditional Usages and Customs” rules and includes seventeen of the thir-ty-six communities in the region. Dur-

ing its first year, it has been under attack by the state government, police forces, and paramilitary groups tied to the PRI and the PUP. The autonomous authori-ties have tried to break their isolation by establishing links to civic organiza-tions and academic institutions in other states in Mexico, in the United States, and in Guatemala. Triqui migrants have been instrumental in weaving these ties. They have also supported the building of roads, infrastructure projects, and ser-vices through remittances. Nevertheless the daily insecurity and political tension in the Lower Triqui region keeps pushing tens of families north.

The Creation of “Multilocal” Families and CommunitiesIn the last few years, school completion rates have increased considerably in Co-pala.5 Yet, unlike the situation two de-cades back, it is the girls who finish high school and go on to college.6 In contrast, most boys leave for the North as soon as they finish junior high. Every year, hundreds of teenagers embark on the undocumented, dangerous journey to the United States. Anticipation to “jump the line” stirs the anxiety and emotion of a rite of passage: walking for hours in the Arizona desert, following the coyote, hiding from the migra, avoiding vicious bugs and cacti, waiting for the raitero to

Commemoration of First Year under Autonomous Municipal Rule, San Juan Copala, Oaxaca. Photo by Luis Alberto Cruz.

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population. Many families can be found, at the same time, in the Copala area, in the other towns in the region (Putla, Juxt-lahuaca and Oaxaca), in Mexico City and its environs, in the agricultural regions and cities of northwestern Mexico, and in several states in the United States. In response to oppression, exploitation, and discrimination by other ethnic and na-tional groups, Triqui communities often encapsulate or self-segregate. “Daughter” communities—like those in Camalú or Colonia Triqui, both in Baja Califor-nia—maintain a close and continuously renovated relationship with the mother community in Copala, through phone calls that ferry news about weddings, births, deaths, anecdotes, and gossip. Bilingual radio, which broadcasts daily updates of families in Oaxaca and the United States, is very popular in north-western Mexico. In Fresno, California, the Radio Bilingüe station occasionally broadcasts in Triqui. Youths make daily use of e-mail and online chat rooms to keep in touch with friends and family thousands of miles away.

Triqui migration is also characterized by the great mobility of single males, of heads of household (both male and fe-male), and occasionally of whole fami-lies, all of whom follow the crop cycle. For children, this means the continuous interruption of the school cycle. Whole families are affected by this instability, suffering growing problems in family in-tegration and extended separation of par-ents and offspring. The absence of males makes it difficult for female heads of household to make sure teenage daugh-ters attend high school in Copala or San-tiaga Juxtlahuaca. Male youths learn to enjoy the trip north, getting used to the liberties the journey entails, to earning dollars, to purchasing electronic gadgets and wearing brand-name clothing, and to meeting other youths of different ethnic groups or to joining gangs. For them it is increasingly difficult to accept paternal authority in an extended family environment or to take on family or communal commitments.

aca and Mexico City. Threats to their lives and the burning down of their homes in Copala forced many families that worked the tomato harvest in Culiacán Valley to stay in Sinaloa. Some of them looked for work in California, where salaries are ten times those in Mexico.10

Triqui laborers’ experience in Baja Cali-fornia was fundamental in extending the migratory networks to the United States. Proximity to the border, which helped cut transportation costs, and their ties to fellow laborers who had crossed the border previously and to subcontractors and supervisors who had interests in the United States, opened up multiple op-portunities for young males, and later whole families, to risk the trip to the United States and look for better-paid jobs. The creation of the northwestern circuit also supported the emergence of a migratory culture based on the consoli-dation of multilocal communities linked by family ties, information flows, and solidarity. Additionally, the Triqui in the north continued their long tradition of political organization and resistance.11 Despite the long absences of family mem-bers, the permanent flow of information has allowed a sense of continuity to flour-ish between the communities in Oaxaca and their offshoots at different destinations on both sides of the border. Communities become detached of their original terri-tory, but reconstitute themselves at the destinations through networks, everyday interactions, and cultural or political par-ticipation. Thus the concept of belonging to the Triqui nation is in flux, since many adults were born in northwestern Mexico and many of their offspring were born in the United States. Some of the adults born in Culiacán or Ensenada speak only Triqui or very little Spanish. Meanwhile Triqui children born in California or who arrived there very young do not learn their mother tongue, but rather a combination of Spanish and English.12

The quick rise of migration has spurred an enormous dispersion of the Triqui

show up, and finally making it to a job that their relatives have found or prom-ised to find for them in California, Ore-gon, Washington, Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, or New York.

Without a doubt, migration is a disruptive process that has radically changed gender and intergenerational relations among the Triqui. Presently, 30 percent of the region’s original population lives in other states in Mexico7 and over 10 percent live in the United States.8 The majority lives almost permanently in the northwestern states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja Cali-fornia. Many have crossed the border to work the fields in West Coast states. The prevalence of family and communal mi-gratory patterns accounts for the fact that nearly as many Triqui women as Triqui men live in northwestern Mexico.9 In California and Oregon, most Triqui mi-grant laborers are young men who follow the fruit and vegetable harvest and live in subhuman conditions in trailers and bar-racks. These laborers return home during the winter, to reunite with their families in northern Mexico. The Triqui started migrating to north-western Mexico in the 1960s. The main destination was Sinaloa but with the de-velopment of export horticulture in Baja California and Sonora many agricultural laborers started migrating cyclically to all of those three states. Initially, they were “hooked” by labor subcontractors, who paid for their transportation from their hometowns to the fields in the north. Be-cause salaries were low, ever more family members joined the flow. Shortly thereaf-ter, migratory networks, based on family, neighborhood, or regional ties, formed and partially substituted the subcontracting ar-rangements. Laborers then had to cover their own and their families’ transportation costs. Being hard up for extra resources led many to seek other jobs at the destina-tions to extend their stays and to save some money. In the 1980s, political violence forced hundreds of families off the land in Copala neighborhoods, who then settled down in Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Putla, Oax-

P o l i T i c a l v i o l e n c e a n D m i g R a T i o n 6 5

Monetizing TraditionsIn addition to the politics that over-shadow the Triqui exile, their culture has adopted important changes related to migration through the networks they have built over thirty years and the ever-increasing cost of keeping their traditions alive. Indeed, serving as civic and reli-gious officials, organizing celebrations, and arranging marriages have become very costly undertakings which can only be met by spending family savings earned over years of salaried work in the fields.

As migration redefines community be-longing and participation, money plays an ever more important role in keeping traditions alive. Religious celebrations involve days-long feasts, which bring together people from the whole region, not only from Copala.13 Mayordomos, the officials in charge of the events, take on all sorts of expenses, ranging from paying for the cattle to be slaughtered, to pro-viding alcoholic beverages and arranging firework displays. Despite the distance, many indigenous migrants remain linked to their commu-nities through economic contributions, return trips during celebrations, and civ-ic or religious duties. At the same time, many Triqui are often forced to emigrate to meet the debts that come with carry-ing on these traditions. Agustín, a sixty-year-old man from Santa Cruz Río Verde, tells his story:

Back [in] 1982, I was municipal agent for the town. I spent a lot of money. I go to Huajuapan, I go to Oaxaca and spend lots of money. I borrow from people. I am chosen municipal agent and serve one year. Next year, I stop being agent, but where do I find money? I owe a lot. I talk to everybody and say “I go to Culiacán, I go to where I can find work, and I pay.” Everybody says, “No, no, don’t go, you work well, don’t worry.” But I want to pay back money. When I stop being munici-pal agent, I went to Culiacán. I owe

Aurelia Dominguez, an indigenous Triqui farm worker from San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, picks cherry tomatoes on a farm just outside of Fairfield. Photo by David Bacon.

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north. Triqui identity has thus gained spatial plasticity. Migrant populations have retained their cultural heritage to create extensions of their home com-munities; they re-signify the destinations with their own culture. As in Copala, the women weave huipiles, bags, coats, and cloth napkins, thousands of miles from home. Whether in Sonora, Baja Califor-nia, or California, migrants use Triqui herbs and healing rituals, and celebrate weddings, baptisms, and other religious events.

At the same time, the notion of belonging to the Triqui nation is quickly changing. Migration is disaggregating local cultures, disintegrating families, and uprooting cultural referents, especially among the youth. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, Triqui youths increasingly identify with north-ern symbols and consumption models. Gender relations have also undergone radical transformations. Migration, schooling, and exposure to mass media all are contributing factors. Men fre-quently express distress at the weaken-ing of traditional forms of control over women. Greater mobility and growing female autonomy intensify feelings of in-fidelity and heighten domestic violence. We can observe both the monetarization of tradition and the disarticulation of pa-triarchal culture. On the one hand, mi-grants’ relative wealth feeds conspicuous consumption during celebrations, may-ordomos’ growing expenditures, and the “inflation” of traditional weddings. On the other hand, young women and men are forced to reinvent their traditions, seeking and finding new ways to go into relationships and express commitment to family unity and communal identity.

family, listened to the conversation, evi-dently upset by it, and determinedly as-sured she would never marry for money.If years ago young women respectfully acquiesced to their parents’ marriage ar-rangements, today the strong patriarchal rule is constantly under attack by the new generations’ nonconformity and discon-tent, particularly by young women who have emigrated to the North or who have finished high school or college. Thus Ana finished high school in Santiago Juxtla-huaca and later got her parents’ permis-sion and support to study architecture at the Universidad Tecnológica de Juchitán. Her father, uncles, and brothers work in New Jersey, while her mother and aunts live in Santiago Juxtlahuaca, where they produce Triqui textiles. Indeed, it is un-likely that Ana will keep Triqui marriage traditions. She has also lost the excep-tional Triqui weaving skills, which passed from mothers to daughters until recently. However, her family is proud of her scho-lastic achievements.

ConclusionsTriqui lands have been at the center of intense political disputes fanned by attempts to control regional markets and to gain access to the more fertile areas. Due to the generalized violence and the continuous violation of human rights, the Triqui are living a modern-day exodus.

Domestic and international migration has dispersed the Lower Triqui commu-nities through central and northwestern Mexico and the United States. This dis-persion has not diluted ethnic identities but rather has reorganized them geo-graphically, through the colonization and reappropriation of institutional and social spaces of cities and town to the

money, I talk to people, I came to Sinaloa. There I picked tomatoes. I remained many years. Some fields I work for a year, others for four months, changed work, Ensenada, Camalú—I remained there with my kids working.14

Other commitments also force whole families to emigrate in search of money. In order to get married, young men need to come up with substantial savings. This has propelled large numbers of youths to seek work in California’s fields, for ex-tended periods of time, before they can come back and “ask for the bride.” Despite constant contact with other cul-tures, the Triqui respect and reproduce their traditions jealously. As has been the case for generations, wedding arrange-ments hew close to tradition. Accompa-nied by an elder relative, a man interested in a woman visits her parents’ home to ask for her hand in marriage. Negotia-tions ensue regarding “the bride’s price,” and, once settled, the groom’s family pays with beer, tortillas, tlayudas, chickens, a goat or a cow, and money. The funda-mental change that has taken place with migration is “inflation” of the tradition. While marriage arrangements used to reinforce solidarity and soften rivalries between families in the community, they now represent an extremely costly com-mercial exchange. During a site visit in January 2008 I wit-nessed a long conversation at the Rodri-guez family house. The central topic was the price for a bride who had recently married in Putla. The women gingerly commented about the eighty thousand pesos the groom’s family had paid. Ana, the nineteen-year -old daughter of the

P o l i T i c a l v i o l e n c e a n D m i g R a T i o n 6 7

notes

According to Pedro Lewin, in the 1990s producers in the Copala region harvested, at most, 400 kilos per hectare, while those near Putla 1. harvested 800 kilos per hectare, on average. See Pedro Lewin, “La gente de la lengua completa (yi ni nanj ni’ inj). El grupo etnolingüís-tico triqui,” in Alicia M. Barabas and Miguel A. Bartolomé, editors, Configuraciones Étnicas en Oaxaca: Perspectivas Etnográficas para las Aautonomías (México: CONACULTA-INAH e Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1999). In early 1990, Oaxaca governor Heladio Ramirez and the Movimiento por la Unión y la Lucha Triqui (MULT) negotiated building a 2. coffee mill and organizing producer cooperatives to ensure fair commercialization of the beans in the Triqui region. Paulino Martínez Delia and his nephew Bonifacio, leaders of MULT, promoted the project among Copala’s residents; on January 23, 1990, they were shot dead by hired gunmen. As is too often the case, justice was never served. See Francisco López Bárcenas, Muerte sin Fin: Crónicas de Represión en la Región Mixteca Oaxaqueña (México: Serie Derechos Indígenas, Centro de Orientación y Asesoría a Pueblos Indígenas/Ce’Acatl, 2002). Lewin, “La gente de la lengua completa,” 238.3. Lewin, “La gente de la lengua completa.”4. According to the 2005 General Population Count, only six boys and five girls between six and fourteen years of age did not attend 5. school. Analphabetism in Copala is much higher among women (61.5 percent) than among men (32.5 percent). The figures are similar for 6. surrounding communities. However, today over 95 percent of girls and boys between six and fourteen years of age attend school. Conteo General de Población y Vivienda, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2005.According to the 2005 Population and Household Survey, out of 32,559 Triqui residing in México, 9,767 live outside of Oaxaca. The 7. main destination within Mexico is Baja California, where 3,435 Triqui live.According to fieldwork done since 2002 and the estimates of organizations like the United Farm Workers, the Proyecto de Ciudadanía 8. de la Costa Central, and the Frente Indígenas de Organizaciones Binacionales, 600 Triqui live in the Salinas Valley; nearly 1,000 live in the Central Valley, and tens of Triqui families live in Santa María, California, and in Oregon. Some Triqui males migrate regularly to the East Coast, specifically to New York and New Jersey. There are also Triqui in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.For example, 1,747 Triqui women and 1,688 men live in Baja California, and 875 Triquis women and 899 men live in Sinaloa.9. Salaries in northwestern Mexico are paid on a per kilo basis. On average, laborers earn 50 pesos per day, approximately $5. In contrast, 10. in California, laborers earn between $6 and $7.5 per hour. In Culiacán, Triquí, and Mixtec, migrant laborers created agricultural worker unions to fight for better contracts and working condi-11. tions. In Baja California, they founded the Triqui Nation Organization, which fights for better living conditions in Ensenada and San Quintin. In California, many Triqui who live and work in the fields of the Central Valley created the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales, in collaboration with other Oaxacan ethnic groups.Even adults adopt common terms used in the labor niche dominated by Hispanics, such as 12. el field, la troca (the truck), and el raite (the ride).In Copala, there are eighteen celebrations spread throughout the year. The most important are Carnival, San Juan, San Jose and Santa 13. Cruz, Easter, and All Saints Day. See Agustín García Alcaraz, Tinujei: Los Triquis de Copala, 2nd ed. (Mexico: Ciesas, 1997): 160–67. Interview with Agustín, Greenfield, April 15, 2003. Agustín, his wife, and two kids went to Culiacan in the 1980s. Two more children 14. were born there. Despite having been born in Culiacan, Hortensia, their youngest daughter, barely speaks Spanish.

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againST The cURRenT: looking foR alTeRnaTiveS To migRaTion in The mexican coUnTRySiDe

John gibleR

Profiling a small-scale and successful fair trade, organic coffee cooperative in Salva-dor Urbina, Chiapas, Gibler reports on local efforts to create alternatives to forced economic migration. Gibler interviews migration experts, state officials, and lo-cal residents in Zacatecas state to probe the forces that compel people to leave their com-munities. He also interviews Gracia Goya, the project manager for transnational pro-grams with Hispanics in Philanthropy, and Juan Manuel Sandoval, who coordinates the Permanent Seminar on Chicano and Border Studies in Mexico City, to engage both supportive and critical perspectives on the very possibility of local alternatives to forced economic migration.

David Roman had been mowing lawns in Miami for two years when he took the call from his father back in Salvador Ur-bina, Chiapas, a small town thirty min-utes from the Guatemalan border. Ro-man’s father had an offer that a migrant rarely hears from back home: a job. Growing an acre or two of coffee on the lush hillsides of southern Chiapas, the job offered a fraction of the pay he earned in Miami, but one benefit that David Ro-man valued above all. “Really I missed my family,” he said. “Sure you can talk on the phone and keep up to date, but it is not the same as being near each other, being able to reach out and hug them when you want to.” And so David Roman made the trip that most undocumented migrants make only after being dumped on the border in Nogales, with whatever they had in their pockets when detained, their shoelaces stripped from their shoes so that they won’t make a run for it before crossing from Ari-zona back into Mexico. Against the cur-rent, he left Miami for Salvador Urbina.

With a population of about 7,000, Sal-vador Urbina is a cluster of tin-roofed houses with open-air kitchens and simple concrete walls that stretch up and down the thick green hillside on either side of a two-lane road running from Tapachula to El Aguila. Coffee trees are everywhere here, filling the surrounding hillsides, in-terspersed with banana, mandarin, South American apricot (mamey) and rambu-tan trees providing shade for the coffee and ready snacks for those tending the coffee. Only a handful of small corn and bean fields remain. Locals say that German immigrants first brought coffee to the region, buying up vast tracts of land for cattle ranching and coffee farming and forcing the locals into virtual slavery. The German who reigned here—none remembered his name—would pay twelve-hour workdays with a single token that could only be used in the German’s store. In the 1940s, inspired by Lázaro Cárde-nas’s promises of land reform, a group of men decided to chase the German off the land and form an ejido, or communal, agricultural land holding. Don Santiago, an eighty-year-old cof-fee farmer who still works his parcel from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. everyday, remembers how the men confused the German’s wife, who wore long pants, for the German himself and shot her in the leg as she stepped out one morning. The German and his family packed up and left. The coffee farmers then founded the town and ejido of Salvador Urbina and for the first time they controlled the land they worked. The farmers in Salva-dor Urbina joined the Mexican Coffee Institute, or Inmecafé, the state-owned

coffee company that guaranteed prices for small farmers. In 1989, President Carlos Salinas dismantled Inmecafé as part of his campaign of privatizations and deregulation leading up to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Soon the farmers of Salvador Urbina found that they had little control over the prices of their crop and were forced to sell to the coyotes, or intermediaries, who gather coffee from small farmers across the country and sell to the large multinational buyers, such as Nestlé. And then came the crash in coffee prices in the 1990s that created a wave of emi-gration from Salvador Urbina, mainly to other parts of Mexico like Puebla, Nayarit and Sonora, but also across the border to the United States. By 2002, the coyotes paid about 350 pesos ($35) a quintal (a sack of cof-fee weighing 57.5 kilograms, or 126.5 pounds), or about 28 cents a pound. An average small farmer in Salvador Urbina made about $520 a year from their cof-fee, the town’s only cash crop. “The value of coffee didn’t crash, the cost of a cup of coffee didn’t fall,” said Ari Cifuentes, a fifty-five-year-old cof-fee farmer in Salvador Urbina, “but the prices crashed because the huge coffee corporations were hoarding to drive the prices down.” Ari Cifuentes and several of his broth-ers went on the road, working on a dam construction site in Nayarit before tak-ing jobs in the maquiladora industry in the border town of Agua Prieta, So-nora. Daniel, one of his younger broth-ers, working in a maquiladora making seatbelts and later farm equipment for John Deere, met and shared a bit of his story with his local minister, Rev. Mark

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Adams, a Presbyterian with the border ministry Frontera de Cristo. Reverend Adams asked why so many people from Mexico’s southernmost state were working in border maquiladoras and crossing over to the United States. Daniel Cifuentes’ answer was simple: everyone in Salvador Urbina grows cof-fee, and coffee prices crashed. A cup of specialty coffee in Phoenix may cost three dollars but farmers did not even earn thirty cents a pound, he told him. Adams asked why this was. The coyotes, Cifuentes told him. Then the idea for Just Coffee hit them.

In 2002 a group of coffee farmers from Salvador Urbina joined together with family members who had migrated to Agua Prieta, Sonora, and the Frontera de Cristo ministry, and founded Just Cof-fee, a worker-owned cooperative that produces, roasts, grinds, and distributes their own organic coffee. “Our goal is to develop a Chiapan owned company providing viable economic incen-tives for young and old to remain on family lands,” says the cooperative’s Web site. Ari Cifuentes, now the cooperative’s president, echoed this goal. “We wanted

to find a way to stay on our land and grow coffee, to not have to migrate,” he said, crouched down by a recently plant-ed Arabica coffee tree. Five years on, the cooperative has grown to include thirty grower members, and it sells well over fifty thousand pounds of coffee a year. In early August 2008 they had com-pletely sold out of last year’s crop.

The co-op also employs six workers, two in Salvador Urbina and four in Agua Pri-eta. “It is a good job and there is always work to do,” said twenty-two-year-old Felix Perez, busy roasting the few pounds

Freshly paved, but empty, streets in El Cargadero, Zacatecas Photo by John Gibler.

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entirely on basic goods such as food, clothing and housing, not on commu-nity development or local production, while the workers sending the money back produce incredible wealth—in terms of development and production—in the United States. “Theories of migration always show the interests of the North,” said Raul Del-gado Wise, the director of Development Studies at the University of Zacatecas. “We need to create different categories to make visible what is happening behind.” For example, Delgado Wise and a team of researchers are using statistics from the United States Department of Labor to calculate Mexicans’ contributions to the U.S. economy. “Migrants born in Mexico contribute 8 percent of the U.S.’s Gross Domestic Product, about $900 billion, which is more than Mexico’s entire GDP,” Del-gado Wise said. “That should give you an idea of the scope of what we’re talking about, the cost to Mexico of migration, of depending on remittances.” Delgado Wise criticizes those in the United States who fail to analyze such statistical information. “The informa-tion is a burden for the United States,” he said. “They do not analyze, for ex-ample, how much Mexico loses, the subsidy that Mexico provides to the United States through Mexican labor, both skilled and unskilled.”

“We need to see really how much it is costing Mexico, how much Mexico is losing. Now is the time to put the num-bers on the table,” he said, adding that public opinion concerning the immi-gration debate in the United States “is always sustained by distorted visions that lack any foundation in empirical evidence.” Delgado Wise, Garcia Zamora, and other researchers at the University of Zacatecas publish a scholarly journal,

in. “This makes it very difficult for the farmers to invest and expand,” Cifuentes said.

But their small-scale success has inspired coffee farmers in El Aguila, the next town down the road, to also pull together thir-ty members to form a cooperative and join in with Just Coffee. And the coffee itself is not their only export: Ari and his brother have traveled to Nicaragua and Haiti to share their experience building the Just Coffee cooperative with small farmers also struggling under the influ-ence of the coyotes.

The Factory of MigrantsMexico economically expels more of its own people than any other country in the world. An estimated half a million Mexicans cross undocumented into the United States looking for work every year. Remittances, the money that Mexi-can immigrants in the United States send to family members back in Mexico, rival the oil industry and illegal drug traffick-ing as the single largest sources of cash in Mexico’s economy. “Mexico is mortgaging its future with migration and remittances,” said Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, professor at the Gradu-ate School of Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas and author of Migration, Remittances and Lo-cal Development. “Look at the statistics: in the ten states with the longest migra-tion histories, 65 percent of municipali-ties have a negative population growth. This means that in the future these com-munities will not be able to reproduce, neither economically nor socially, because the demographics of migration have con-demned them to disappear.” Garcia Zamora and his colleagues at the University of Zacatecas argue that the apparent wealth of remittances, the an-nual flow of some $30 billion back into Mexico, obscures the twin economic facts of mass migration: families spend the money sent back to Mexico almost

of coffee for local distribution. Felix had worked for two years in various factories in Tijuana before returning to Salvador Urbina and taking the job at Just Cof-fee. Cifuentes said that their main problem right now was that payments came back slowly to the farmers. Since they distrib-ute their own coffee in Arizona and they have little capital to speak of, they must repay the farmers for their crop bit by bit as the coffee sells and the money comes

“—‘Sir, it’s time to reap what you sowed.’—‘But I didn’t sow anything.’

—‘Of course you did. Hunger and misery.’”Cartoon by Fisgon, courtesy of La Jornada.

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will go to work in the maquiladoras or enter the United States as undocument-ed laborers.

A Culture of Migration?Many in the Mexican government see no problem with the NAFTA model nor the mass Mexican emigration it has produced; they dismiss critics such as Delgado Wise and Garcia Zamora as “fa-talists.” Cliserio Pinero, the spokesper-son for the Zacatecas state Department of Planning and Development, shooed away political criticisms of the impacts of migration on the countryside, saying, “We have a migration culture; we see it as something cultural.”

NAFTA, they argue, saying that the agreement restructured Mexico’s econo-my to provide for the labor needs of the U.S.’s own industrial restructuring.

“In Mexico,” Garcia Zamora said, “we have exported the factory of migrants.” Both Garcia Zamora and Delgado Wise argue that the supposed increases in Mexican manufacturing exports are a ruse: the increases all come from the maquiladora sector where Mexico only adds labor to assemble imported parts into exported commodities. The real ex-port factories are the Mexican families raising the young men and women who

Migration and Development, and are deeply involved in organizing what Delgado Wise calls “an alternative think tank to the World Bank” to be called the Consortium for Critical Development Studies. They have produced reams of books, essays, and reports arguing that to understand the massive wave of migration from Mexico to the United States, one must critically analyze the model of U.S.-Mexico economic in-tegration that began in the 1980s and reached its maximum expression with NAFTA, which came into effect on January 1, 1994. Very little was genuinely “free” about

Felix Perez, 22, returned to Salvador Urbina and took a job with Just Coffee after two years working in factories in Tijuana. Photo by John Gibler.

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Mario Garcia is the local municipal del-egate in El Cargadero in charge of main-taining road conditions and the heavy machinery needed for making repairs; he is also a small farmer growing corn and beans. All but one of his ten brothers and sisters migrated to the United States. He went to California for five months to work himself, but decided to come back. “In Mexico, if you work a couple of shifts, you can live okay,” he said, “with-out so many luxuries and freeways, but you can live a more peaceful life.” But he is finding that the peace comes hard these days. “This is a community abandoned by migration,” he said. “I have always re-lated migration to the government; the government should work to keep people in the country, to find jobs, to better living conditions. They say that people have a better quality of life in the Unit-ed States, but it is a quality of life that is half slavery, where people can’t come back and continue to build in their own communities.” The problem, he said, is to be found in the empty fields and the vicious cycle of abandonment created by NAFTA. “We need to analyze more closely free trade,” he said, “because free trade might be benefiting everybody but Mexico. There might be a few new millionaires, but there are a lot more people who got shafted; it is not even. Before NAFTA we produced tons of peaches, and the national markets all shouted out for peaches from Zacatecas. But with NAF-TA, U.S. companies started exporting peaches from Chile and Brazil and the prices fell. We couldn’t sell our peaches anymore and people starting leaving to look for work in the U.S.” “The countryside is broken,” he contin-ued. “The rural economy needs to be re-activated. Zacatecas is very dry, but can

“Mexico has an excess of laborers. We complement each other.” Robledo administers the Zacatecas state government’s “three-for-one” program, where the municipal, state, and federal governments match each dollar supplied by migrants’ organizations for local de-velopment projects. Apart from local “three-for-one” projects which range from paving streets to build-ing new churches, the state government’s development plan, Robledo said, is to make the NAFTA model run even more smoothly by literally paving new roads north to the border. “If you had fifty million dollars in the budget for development, would you use that to increase production in the coun-tryside or to build an interstate high-way?” Robledo asked. “It is a political and economic decision.” The government has decided on the highways but few in Zacatecas’ aban-doned countryside agree that this is the right choice. In the small town of El Cargadero, dis-cussed as a model of successful devel-opment based on remittances and the “three-for-one” program, paved streets and freshly painted houses greet visitors but few people do. Eighty-five percent of the population has moved to the United States.

“Look how it is now, nothing,” said Jose Ortiz Martinez, behind the counter of a store with empty shelves, selling only a few packs of cigarettes, chewing gum, and bottles of soda. “Sometimes hours go by without a single person walking out in the street to buy some chewing gum. Before we grew a lot of avocadoes here; now there is nothing left, just a bunch of old folks here in town.” There was one taco stand but it closed down last year and its owner went to look for work in California.

Fernando Robledo, the director of the governmental Zacatecas State Migra-tion Institute, also rejected the criti-cisms of Delgado Wise and Garcia Zamora, fully embracing the politics of migration: “The United States econo-my demands cheap labor,” he said.

Don Santiago, 80, a member of the Just Coffee coop-erative, works his land everyday from 6 am to 11 am. In the photo he is drying individual coffee beans that ripened early in the season. Photo by John Gibler.

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produce many fruits and beans. Here the opposite of what happened in Cali-fornia is taking place: rich agricultural land is being turned into desert by lack of investment and support and because the people aren’t here. The workers who make things happen are all in the United States and here we are left in abandon. It is a huge problem.” I ask him what alternatives could be implemented in the United States and in Mexico to address the broken countryside. “The solution here would be for the Mex-ican government to build strategies to put the brakes on this, so that the countryside can produce again,” he said. But the Zacatecas state government, rather than putting on the brakes, is step-ping on the gas. Robledo said that Za-catecas’s top development priorities were constructing highways north toward the border and building greenhouses for ex-port crops in the countryside. “We are changing the production system in the countryside, building greenhouses and changing crops,” Robledo said. Gracia Goya, the project manager for transnational programs with Hispan-ics in Philanthropy, disagrees with that approach. She said that Hispanics in Philanthropy is seeking local productive projects for funding and to thus help communities create, from the grassroots up, alternatives to emigration.

“We do not want to change the voca-tions people have in their communities,” Goya said. “We need to respect these and strengthen them. These people know how to work the land and raise livestock; what they are looking for is support in doing what they already know how to do well.” Hispanics in Philanthropy started working in Mexico funding produc-tive projects linked to migration in

Ari Cifuentes, 55, is the president of the Just Coffee cooperative. In the photo he is tending to a recently planted Arabica coffee tree. Photo by John Gibler.

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2006. They received seventeen pro-posals that year and chose only one; the others did not meet the strict pro-duction requirements. “We realized that Mexican organiza-tions, and especially in Guanajuato, do not have that much experience in pro-ductive projects,” Goya said. In 2007, Hispanics in Philanthropy be-gan funding a goat cheese cooperative in Guanajuato state, in conjunction with the local nongovernmental organization, CHOICE (Centro Humanitario para las Obras y el Intercambio Cultural y Edu-cativo). They awarded CHOICE and the cooperative a grant for $220,000 over three years. Goya said that Hispanics in Philanthropy is not interested in three-for-one type infrastructure projects; all projects must create a good or a service, they must be productive. She said that the government’s three-for-one initiatives largely displaced the task of development onto the poorest. “They are worthy projects,” she said, “but we see a problem there in that the focus is on taking on the functions of the Mexican state. We do not want to substitute the functions of the state in any way. These projects create some comforts, but they do not stimulate pro-duction, stimulate the economy. What we want to do is help generate change from the grassroots.”

The AlternativeYet not even all the critics of NAFTA

and the economic forces that propel people to emigrate agree that such grass-roots alternatives can be effective. Juan Manuel Sandoval, a Mexican academic and activist working on migration and border issues, said that no real alterna-tives exist without first jettisoning NAF-TA. “If some local productive project works, whom does it benefit? Very few people,” Sandoval said. “There are no real local community-level alternatives. There aren’t any such alternatives be-cause the external pressures are so strong they impede them.” Sandoval, who coordinates the Perma-nent Seminar on Chicano and Border Studies in Mexico City and is a member of the board of directors of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (USA), said that people in the Mexican countryside cannot compete with the transnational corporations. “So what can they do?” he asked. “They have to move. They can go work in a maquiladora, but that is no alternative. There are no possible local or commu-nity-level alternatives while such in-tense pressures from the large corpora-tions continue to exist. It is impossible to visualize a panorama for communi-ties, cities, [or] the entire country while neoliberal politics remain dominant. What is needed is a change in the eco-nomic regime.”

Every year some half a million Mexi-cans keep crossing the border to look for work in the United States, Sandoval said, adding that eight out of every ten

actually had a job in Mexico. They left Mexico, he said, because the jobs they had offered poverty wages and no ben-efits or pension plans.

I briefly described the experience of Just Coffee and asked his opinion. “Yes, it is possible that a community, exclusively through its own effort, may attain minimal living conditions,” he said. “But those who seek isolated, local alternatives have not yet grasped the re-lation between migration and so-called free trade. There is no real alternative without a change of the economic and political regime.” When I arrived in Salvador Urbina, Chiapas, a coyote’s van had just left for the border with twelve young men off to seek work in the United States. Da-vid Roman, who joined Just Coffee two years ago—accepting the cooperative’s rules for producing organic, shade-grown coffee and the promise to deliver fifteen quintales, or just under two thou-sand pounds of Arabica coffee a year—is still waiting for last year’s payments. He works year round, produces over four thousand pounds of coffee and makes $2,400 a year, or $200 a month. But he is back with his family, he said, working his own land. “There is a lot of work still to be done,” he said, “but it is good to be back home.”

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gibler, John. “mexico’s ghost Towns.” In These Times, June 2008. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3693/

Red internacional migracion y Desarrollo (an excellent electronic archive in Spanish and english): http://www.migracionydesarrollo.org.

Regan, margaret. “Roasting Revolution.” Tucson Weekly, february 8, 2007. http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/yum/content?oid=oid%3a92309

Sandoval, Juan manuel, “mexican labor migration and the north american free Trade agreement (nafTa): 1994-2006.” Paper presented during the “Push and Pull: immigration and free Trade” national speaking tour organized by global exchange, april 15 through may 2, 2007, http://www.globalexchange.org/getinvolved/speakers/SandovalnafTa.pdf.

Wise, Raul Delgado. “migration and imperialism: The mexican Workforce in the context of nafTa,” Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 2 (march 2006), 33–45.

Zamora, Rodolfo garcia. Migración, Remesas, y Desarrollo Local. Zacatecas: Universidad autonoma de Zacatecas, 2003.

further Reading

In Cerrito de Agua, Zacatecas, freshly painted concrete houses—most of them empty, their owners working in the U.S.—stand in contrast to the town’s unpaved, though also empty, streets. Photo by John Gibler.

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a mexican laboR PeRSPecTive on The iSSUeS facing mexican WoRkeRS in The UniTeD STaTeS

beRTha lUJan UScanga WiTh Daniel la boTZ

Acknowledging the complex economic and social interdependence of North Ameri-can countries, Lujan and Labotz explore how progressive U.S. labor and immigra-tion policies can affect and benefit workers across the continent. The authors detail the deleterious effects of globalization and free-trade policies on national labor movements, expound on the need for upward harmo-nization of labor standards, and advocate for a policy approach that capitalizes on the NAFTA framework to develop systemic solutions to the immigration crisis. Focus-ing on the influence of U.S. policies, Lu-jan and Labotz call on Congress to enact an Employee Free Choice Act, establish a tri-national legislative working group to chart and evaluate labor policy reform in the NAFTA region, improve regulation of foreign-operating U.S. corporations, uphold UN labor union standards, and develop a continental open-labor-migration policy.

IntroductionWhat legislation can U.S. Congress pass to improve the lives of Mexican workers? This may seem like a strange question. We usually think of the Mexican Con-gress helping Mexican workers and the U.S. Congress helping U.S. workers. But today our situations have become so in-terdependent that we must look to both political powers to do their part to im-prove the lives of all of us. Mexico and the United States, together with Canada, have become linked to-gether in a complex economic, social, and political system that has distorted all three countries’ development and harmed working people in each of them. All of us are experiencing increasing concentra-tions of wealth in the hands of individu-als and corporations, while the majority of working people have seen their stan-dard of living decline. In Mexico, the fall in living standards results from the lack

of jobs and the deep decline in workers’ wages’ purchasing power. The inequi-table distribution of wealth falls hardest on working people, the poor, the elderly, women, and children. Millions in Can-ada, Mexico, and the United States live in poverty from which they see no hope of escaping. How can we begin to change the direc-tion of the continent’s political economy in such a way as to better the lives of working people? We cannot do so from Mexico alone, for much of our economy, society, and politics has come to depend upon the United States. Since signing NAFTA, Mexico has become increasing-ly integrated into the economic sphere of the United States. We depend on loans from U.S. banks and have an indebted-ness of $140 billion, mostly to them. We are integrated into the U.S. system of in-dustrial production, providing resources and raw materials—most importantly oil—to their economy. We produce com-ponents for U.S. manufactured goods, such as electrical and auto parts. And we are an export platform for U.S. corpora-tions in industries such as automobile manufacturing. We have also become an increasingly important market for U.S. wholesalers and retailers, as witnessed by the spectacular growth of Wal-Mart—now our largest single employer. Those of us in Mexico therefore have a deep interest in and a great concern about de-velopment in the United States. Recent discussions of the U.S.-Mexico relationship have focused on immigra-tion controls, border enforcement, build-ing a wall between our two countries, and even the militarization of our common frontier. These measures are not only ex-tremely expensive, but they also generate a lot of ill will and attack symptoms rath-er than proposing solutions. We should

instead focus our efforts on getting leg-islative bodies to develop policy changes and laws that would begin to alter our political-economic system to the benefit of all workers. The U.S. Congress can do much to improve the situation of Mexican working people and Mexican migrants.

NAFTA as a TouchstoneAt the center of the tri-national relation-ship is NAFTA, which has had a pro-found and negative impact on working people since 1994. In Mexico, NAFTA led first to the bankruptcy of many thou-sands of small businesses and in some cases of entire industries, throwing tens of thousands out of work, and later to the collapse of thousands of small farms, adding over a million and a half more to the ranks of the unemployed. Many Mexican farmers or peasants, no longer able to make a living in the countryside, have joined the search for jobs in Mexi-co’s cities or left for the United States to seek work. Some Mexican migrants enter the United States as H2A or H2B visa workers. Many more cross the border without papers, exposing them to the worst forms of labor exploitation. At the same time, conservative forces in the United States have held immigrants responsible for the country’s economic ills and whipped up nationalism and racial animosity. Government authori-ties have carried out raids to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, of-ten breaking up families. What policy proposals could be submitted to the U.S. Congress that would change the situation in Mexico, the United States, and Canada in such a way as to help these Mexican workers, and at the same time to help workers in the other coun-tries as well?

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Although NAFTA contributes to these problems, it can also be used as a touch-stone for thinking about issues of trade, workers’ rights and interests, and social justice. NAFTA provisions require that all three partner countries maintain high labor standards and strive to improve those standards. As we turn to examine labor issues, we should keep in mind that our countries have pledged to maintain and improve standards governing work-ers rights. We sometimes call this the harmonization of labor standards based on international humanitarian principles such as those of the United Nations.1 When looking for labor standards, those in the United States should consider that Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 states that Mexican workers are entitled to a job at a living wage, to the right to organize a union, and the right to strike. While those rights are more often than not abused and neglected, they set a high and desirable standard. The U.S. Constitution does not give workers the right to a job, a living wage, labor union organization, collective bar-gaining, or the right to strike. In 1998 the U.S. Labor Party, made up of many U.S. labor unions, called for a 28th Amendment to the Constitution which would guarantee workers the right to a job at a living wage. The governments of North America should all protect workers’ rights to a job at a living wage, with the understanding that if private employers cannot produce enough jobs, then the government becomes the em-ployer of last resort. In 2007, the idea of a continental living wage was raised and a campaign for such a wage is now being launched.2 This campaign bases itself on the many living-wage laws and ordinances that have been adopted by cities throughout the United States and on the Mexican Constitution’s living-

wage language. The U.S. Congress should also consider this important is-sue: how to provide a living wage for workers in the United States but also for workers throughout North America. Guaranteed jobs and living wages would represent upward harmonization for all workers in North America.

National SovereigntyThe danger today is that our countries are being harmonized by other means, driven by the desire of corporations and governments to exert more control over resources, markets, and labor. The Se-curity and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) builds on the worst features of NAFTA and threatens to bring harmonization by expanding the power of multina-tional corporations and political and military control.

One policy that grew out of the SPP—the Merida Initiative—furthers a long history of U.S. involvement in the poli-tics, economy, and society of Mexico. This involvement has often made it dif-ficult, if not impossible, for us to control our own economy and better our lives. Today the United States spends many millions of dollars to influence the in-ternal political, police, and military af-fairs of Mexico, pushing its own agenda and priorities, and making it impossible for Mexicans to control their own des-tinies. U.S. anti-drug police have been in Mexico since 1963, and within the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) since 1973; in 2007 they had eight offices in Mexico.3 U.S. military aid to Mexico was budgeted at $1.1 million for English language, counterterrorism, and coun-ter-narcotics training and $2.5 million

Tough Game. Cartoon by Fisgon, courtesy of La Jornada.

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Mexico has historically had a mixed economy made up of the state sector, so-cial property leased in perpetuity (ejidos), worker cooperatives, and the private sec-tor. Such a mixed economy within the context of a regulated market, another historical characteristic of our economy, is desirable for Mexico’s future economic health. In order to create enough jobs for its citizens and see that workers earn a living wage, Mexico must control its strategic resources, industries, and own domestic market. The ability of the Mexican people to con-trol their own economy, and the ability of Canadians and U.S. citizens to control theirs, was swept away by the economic developments of the 1980s that culmi-nated in the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. During the period from 1964 to the 1970s, U.S. corporations moved their factories from the Great Lakes re-gion of the Midwest and established them as maquiladoras, electronics plants and auto-parts plants located on the bor-der. Canadian and U.S. workers lost jobs; Mexicans gained jobs, but at below-sub-sistence wages of $4.50 per day. For Mexico, NAFTA meant a govern-ment auction of over one thousand state-owned companies, which were sold to private investors from Mexico, Canada, the United States, and Europe. We lost our publicly owned telephone company and railroads. Carlos Slim, who has be-come the wealthiest man in Mexico and one of the wealthiest in the world, bought the telephone company, together with Southwest Bell. The railroads were sold to Union Pacific and Kansas City Railroad. So now U.S. corporations con-trol our vital and strategic industries. Today President Felipe Calderón and the National Action Party (PAN), joined by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), propose a second set of economic reforms aimed at privatizing the energy sector—the petroleum industry and electric power generation. These reforms would eliminate the last vestiges of the

and high levels of out-migration—exists within a broader political, economic, and social context. If they were able to earn a decent living in their own country, most Mexican workers would choose to stay in Mexico rather than migrating abroad in search of work at higher wages. The first priority then is to create jobs and raise wages in Mexico. But if Mexico is to do this, it must have sovereignty—that is, the ability to control its internal affairs free of U.S. intervention.

The Mexican EconomyControl of our affairs means control of our resources and markets. While we recognize that the world has become globally integrated and we cannot re-turn to a period of economic national-ism, we do believe that Mexico should be able to exert greater control over its own economic development within the global context. At the same time, we should pursue globalization by and for working people, a globalization from the bottom up.

for counterterrorism equipment to the Mexican military in 2006.4 The pro-posed SPP with Mexico calls for $41.4 million in military aid.5 The Merida Initiative, as it was first announced in March 2007, would give $400 million in police and military assistance in the first year. The total amount foreseen be-ing delivered to Mexico is $1.4 billion.6 We believe that this approach will dam-age Mexico, since it makes it hard for us to control our own affairs. These mea-sures are counterproductive from a U.S. point of view as well, since they do not get at the political and economic roots of our common problems. We need so-cial harmonization, not corporate and military harmonization. It is necessary to discuss sovereignty and militarization in a paper about bringing labor issues to the U.S. Congress because if U.S. corporations or the military con-trol our country, we cannot improve our workers’ lives. The Mexican labor prob-lem—that is, the lack of jobs, low wages,

Immigrant Latino workers from the Woodfin Suites hotel and their supporters rally outside the hotel. Hotel managers fired 20 workers, accusing them of lacking legal permission to work, and al-leging that they don’t have valid Social Security numbers. Workers say the hotel is retaliating against them for trying to enforce the city’s new living wage ordinance. Photo by David Bacon.

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The principal labor federation in the United States also split, as some unions left the AFL-CIO to join the new Change to Win. The UNT and the FAT have, in past years, engaged in co-operation with unions in both of these federations, as well as with some that belong to neither, such as the United Electrical Workers (UE). Both U.S. la-bor federations, as well as independent unions such as the UE, have moved over the last decade to represent and fight for all workers, including those who come—with or without documents—from Mexico, other Latin American countries, or other parts of the world. We applaud them for doing so. Still, we see a need for greater cooperation be-tween unions in Canada, Mexico, and the United States on common prob-lems, especially around the issue of mi-grant worker protection. We should encourage worker-to-worker meetings such as those organized by the FAT, the UE, and the CNS Quebec. When workers sit down and talk with each other, they overcome stereotypes, learn about the realities of each others’ lives, and find they have much in com-mon. We should encourage cross-border leadership meetings over common con-cerns within the same industries, corpo-rations and contracts with the goal of building union power internationally to successfully combat the corporations and win improvements in workers’ lives. And we should be meeting togeth-er to discuss the immigration issue. We should encourage U.S. federations and independent unions to seek a common platform on the question of immigrant workers’ rights. Unions should work for a program that gives the broadest protection to immigrants now in the United States or Canada and makes it possible for them to live and work in those countries legally. The labor move-ment should also oppose guest-worker programs that exploit immigrants. We should work together to create fair-trade agreements that protect and en-hance migrant workers’ rights.

this time not as a free-trade agreement but rather as a fair-trade agreement aimed at improving the economic lives of the working people of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The agricultural sections of NAFTA, as Mexican peasants and small- and medium-sized producers have demanded, should be renegotiated to offer protection from subsidized U.S. agricultural products and to eliminate or equalize subsidy supports. All future trade agreements should include labor rights elements as central topics, not as side agreements, as was the case with the recently adopted Panama Free Trade Agreement.8

The Impact of Neoliberalism and Globalization on Labor UnionsThe neoliberal economic transformation of the economy on a world scale—the opening of markets; deregulation and privatization; cuts in education, health, and social welfare—has had a powerful impact on unions everywhere. Around the world and on every continent, tri-partite social pacts between government, employers, and unions have been broken. Throughout Latin America, governments have reformed labor legislation, strength-ening the hands of employers and weak-ening unions and workers. Governments and employers launched an assault on labor unions and contracts protecting workers. Faced with new challenges, the dominant labor federations split in many countries. In Mexico, all of these things have hap-pened. Labor unions and contracts have been weakened, pay has not kept up, and conditions have declined. But at the same time, state control over unions has also broken down. For decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party con-trolled the Congress of Labor (CT) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Today we also have a ten-year-old independent labor federation called the National Union of Workers (UNT) in which the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), the union to which I belong, plays an important role.

Mexican people’s ability to manage their own economy and determine their own fate. The Broad Progressive Front (FAP), the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and the legitimate government of Mexico of Andrés Manuel López Ob-rador are leading the fight to stop the passage of these reforms. If Mexico is to provide for the economic well-being of its society, the Mexican government and its state companies (paraestales) must be able to control the nation’s strategic resources—above all, its power generation and petroleum indus-tries. Petróleos Mexicanos, the Central Mexican Light and Power Company, and the Mexican Electrical Commis-sion should be free from external pres-sures for privatization. These industries are essential to the well-being of Mexico and the Mexican people, to the financial health of the state, and to the workers employed by them. The privatization of these companies will damage the eco-nomic health of Mexico, lead to the mass layoff of Mexican workers, and destroy the historic gains of Mexican workers in the areas of wages, benefits, and working conditions. The U.S. government should respect what remains of Mexico’s mixed econ-omy, and legislative means should be found to deter U.S. corporations from intervening in the Mexican economy, with an eye to promoting privatization for their own gain. If Mexico is to provide more jobs at de-cent wages for its citizens, then Mexico must have greater control over its in-ternational economic relationships. NAFTA has been extremely damaging to the Mexican workers, peasants and the economy as a whole.7 Mexico and its partners must be able to negotiate or renegotiate treaties such as NAFTA. Mexico must be able to manage foreign investment, foreign trade, and other as-pects of international economic relation-ships. The U.S. government should join with Mexico in renegotiating NAFTA,

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fer, and regulate profit repatriation to al-low foreign countries to benefit too.

Workers’ RightsThe most important institution in the defense of workers’ rights and the strug-gle for their interests is the labor union. Workers must have the right to labor unions of their own choosing, to bargain collectively, and to strike. All genuine labor unions must be truly independent from government or employer control. Labor unions should be free to affiliate with political parties as they choose but should not be forced into affiliation with political parties. The United Nations declarations and the International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions establish a floor for international labor standards. The most important of these is ILO Convention 87, guaranteeing the right of freedom of association—that is, workers’ right to or-ganize unions. Over one hundred coun-tries have signed ILO Convention 87, but the United States is not one of them. So far the United States has signed only about 10 percent of the 160 active ILO conventions. The U.S. Congress should agree to sign the ILO conventions, the international standard for the protection of workers’ rights.10

The situation of workers in the United States—native-born workers, workers with visas, and undocumented work-ers—is deplorable. A recent study found that guest workers in the U.S. were in a situation “close to slavery.”11 A recent Human Rights Watch report found that U.S. labor laws had ceased to protect workers, whether native-born or immi-grant.12 The U.S. Congress should pass and revise U.S. labor law so that workers actually have the right to unionize, bar-gain collectively, and strike. Once the U.S. has adopted the ILO con-ventions and revised its own labor laws, the U.S. Congress should insist that Mexico also bring its labor laws up to the international standard, and that it honor

the Employee Free Choice Act, it would be a benefit to workers in all three coun-tries, since it would represent a lifting of the continental standard. We should also ask the inter-parliamen-tary working groups of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, that bring togeth-er legislators from all three countries to discuss common issues, to take up the matter of workers’ rights violations. We should ask them to create a binational or tri-national congressional commission or task force on workers’ rights. Such a com-mission might hold hearings on these is-sues in the countries involved, and make recommendations to both countries or to international bodies. We should see all such developments as opportunities to organize workers to fight for their rights, to take the idea of workers’ rights to the public, and to promote a vision of a so-ciety in which everyone enjoys not only rights, but also a decent standard of liv-ing in a healthy environment. The U.S. Congress should also regulate U.S. corporations operating in other countries, for the good of U.S. workers as well as workers in Canada, Mexico, and other countries. Why should U.S. corporations, held to certain standards in the United States, be able to treat work-ers and communities in other countries poorly? Why should U.S. corporations be able to discriminate against the politi-cally powerless and poor in other coun-tries, often in the search for cheap wages, a practice that is also detrimental to U.S. workers? The U.S. Congress should pass laws that hold these corporations to the highest U.S. and international standards everywhere. The U.S. Congress should also regulate corporate foreign investment and tax foreign corporate earnings, using these as tools to shape foreign investment for the benefit of U.S. and foreign work-ing families. The U.S. Congress should require that corporations investing in Mexico pay a living wage, protect the environment, respect international labor standards, permit workers to unionize, develop programs for technology trans-

Trade Agreements and Labor RightsMany of us in Mexico hoped that the end of the PRI would mean that indepen-dent and democratic unions in Mexico would flourish. But after being elected, President Vicente Fox (PAN) continued to make political deals with the corrupt labor establishment. Employers, lawyers, and gangsters still have control of some unions. Today many Mexican workers still have sindicatos fantasmas (ghost unions), whose very existence is un-known to them, and contratos de protec-ción (protection contracts) that provide workers with only the legal minimums to which they are entitled without a union. U.S. and other foreign corporations, as well as Mexican employers, often bring in such unions and contracts through an agreement with a gangster union of-ficial or corrupt lawyer before a plant even opens. Those phony unions and their worthless protection contracts keep wages low for workers and profits high for corporations. The presence of those gangster unions also keeps workers from joining or organizing a democratic union of their own choice. As mentioned above, NAFTA’s side agreement on labor provides that all of our labor standards should be raised to the highest level for the benefit of work-ers in all three countries. We do see cases of such upward harmonization—for ex-ample, in the recent decision by the Ca-nadian Supreme Court to recognize that collective bargaining forms a fundamen-tal part of the freedom of association.9 In the United States there is hope that, if a Democratic Party majority results from the 2008 elections, the U.S. Congress would pass the Employee Free Choice Act. In Mexico, although the govern-ment has said that it is committed to promoting secret-ballot union-represen-tation elections and public registries of labor unions and contract, it has failed to fulfill this promise. To the contrary, it is promoting a reform to the Federal La-bor Law that is entirely pro-business and anti-union. If the U.S. Congress passes

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its own Constitution Article 123, Fed-eral Labor Law, and ILO conventions. These measures would protect workers in both the United States and Mexico. The U.S. Congress should work with Mexico and Canada to guarantee the highest standards of workers throughout the continent based on best standards found throughout the world. We should see continental labor law reform for workers in all three countries. In Canada, Mexico, and the United States, union national constitutions, local by-laws, and all contracts should be a matter of public record and available to governments, em-ployers, workers, and the public.

Immigrant Workers and their WelfareAn estimated 485,000 Mexican work-ers migrate to work in the United States each year, of whom perhaps sixty thou-sand have work visas. The existing U.S. immigration policies and policies gov-erning migrant workers do not func-tion in the interest of the United States, Mexico, employers, or workers. The U.S. Congress should work with Canada and Mexico toward a policy of open labor migration that parallels the movement of capital and commodities (see Hing in this volume). The U.S. Congress should work with Mexico and Canada to create employ-ment laws that prevent employers from evading responsibility for their workers through subcontracting. The problem of the use of labor contractors is especially pernicious in the area of agriculture in the United States where agribusiness re-lies on contractors to provide workers, thereby avoiding responsibility for their transportation, housing, wages, benefits or conditions. The system of agricultural contract labor should be eliminated. The U.S., Mexican, and Canadian gov-ernments should work to facilitate pro-grams to help workers find jobs of their own choosing where employers take full responsibility for workers as employees (although government contract labor,

guest worker, or bracero programs are not desirable). Migrant workers face serious social problems in the United States, particu-larly problems of occupational safety and health. Studies have found that foreign-born workers, most of them La-tinos, have higher rates of fatalities and injuries.13 The U.S. Congress, working with Mexico, Canada, the World Health Organization, and Pan-American Health Organization, should develop environ-mental and occupational health legisla-tion that establishes the same standards and entails the same enforcement in all three countries, based on the high-est standards of protection for workers. Employers in all three countries should be taxed to pay for this program. Migrant workers also face other health problems, for example, chronic diseases. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recognized the need for coordinated programs to

deal with tuberculosis as an international U.S.-Mexico health issue.14 There have also been calls for greater cooperation to deal with other infectious diseases.15 The U.S. Congress, working with the CDC and its counterparts in Canada and Mexico, should continue to develop common workers’ health programs with coordination across the border, improv-ing upon existing programs dealing with tuberculosis, hepatitis, and AIDS. Em-ployers in all three countries should be taxed to pay for this program.

Families, Women and ChildrenThe families of migrants, especially women and children, should receive spe-cial consideration. Canada, Mexico, and the United States should work to create programs that support migrant workers and their children across borders. The U.S. Congress, working with Mexi-co and Canada, should set up a migrato-ry workers’ children education and social welfare program to ensure continuity of

San Francisco, May 1st, 2008. On May Day immigrants and their supporters marched through the streets of San Francisco. Marchers protested a growing wave of raids and deportations, and

efforts by the Federal government to force employers to fire workers for lack of immigration visas... Photo by David Bacon.

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cal movement that puts the rights and the needs of working people first, before cor-porate profits and political motivations. The future of the continent ultimately depends on working people constructing a movement that can create another sort of society, one in which workers’ power and self-management and participatory democracy combine to create a society predicated upon economic equality and social justice.

households, provide maternity leave, and create child-care centers. The aim should be to make women workers’ lives safer, more secure, and freer. Employers should pay for the program.

ConclusionU.S., Mexican, and Canadian labor unions, social movements, and nongov-ernmental organizations should collabo-rate to build pressure to change policies in all three countries. We need to work together to build an international politi-

education and the well-being of workers’ children in all three countries. Employers in all three countries should be taxed to pay for this program. The U.S. Congress should work with Mexico and Canada in developing a pro-gram for the protection and support of women workers in all three countries and those who migrate between countries. The program should protect women from human trafficking, offer social sup-port to women who are also heads of

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The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the United Nations 1. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights all contain sections defending workers or union rights. See “A Sum-mary of United Nations Agreements on Human Rights,” Human Rights Web, http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html. Richard Roman and Edur Velasco, “Mexican Workers Call for a Continental Workers’ Campaign for Living Wages and Social Justice,” 2. Bilaterals.org, May 20, 2007, http://www.bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=8355. Office of the Inspector General, “The Drug Enforcement Administrations Internal Operations (Redacted)” Audit Report, February 3. 7–19, 2007, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/DEA/a0719/app2.htm. The aid was cut off when the United States imposed sanctions on Mexico in October 2005 after Mexico became a signatory to the 4. Hague-based ICC, which had been set up in 2002. Laura Carlsen, “Plan Mexico,” 5. Foreign Policy in Focus, October 20, 2007, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4684. Natalia Gómez, “Otorgará 6. Iniciativa Mérida 500 mdd a México en Primer Año,” El Universal, October 22, 2007, http://www.eluniver-sal.com.mx/notas/456623.html#. International Federation for Human Rights, “Report: International Fact Finding Mission: Mexico, The North American Free Trade 7. Agreement (NAFTA): Effects on Human Rights, Violations of Labour Rights,” International Federation for Human Rights, April 2006; Alberto Arroyo et al, “Lessons from NAFTA: the High Cost of ‘Free Trade’,” Hemispheric Social Alliance, June 2003.“U.S., Panama Sign Free Trade Pact Just in Time,” Reuters, June 28, 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/8. idUSN2730746720070628. Glen Chochia, “Landmark Ruling Guarantees Canadian Workers Collective Bargaining Rights,” 9. Labor Notes, http://www.labornotes.org/node/1267. International Labor Organization (ILO) Web site posts the conventions and signers: http://www.ilo.org/global/lang--en/index.htm 10. Southern Poverty Law Center, 11. Close to Slavery: Guest Worker Programs in the United States, http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPL-Cguestworker.pdf Lance Compa, 12. Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000). Compa is also the author of a study of workers’ rights in Mexico: Lance Compa, Justice for All: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in Mexico (New York: AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, 2003). Katherine Loh and Scott Richardson, “Foreign-born Workers: Trends in Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1996–2001,” 13. Monthly Labor Review, June 2006, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2004/06/art3full.pdf; X. Dong and J. W. Platner, “Occupational Fatalities of Hispanic Construction Workers,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 45 (2004), 45–54.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Preventing and Controlling Tuberculosis along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Work Group 14. Report, MMWR, January 19, 2001, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5001a1.htm. Michele Weinberg, et al., “The U.S.-Mexico Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project: Establishing Bi-national Border Surveil-15. lance,” Emerging Infection Diseases 9 (2003), http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/Eid/vol9no1/02-0047.htm.

notes

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The UnexPecTeD conSeqUenceS of DeePening inTegRaTion: nafTa, immigRaTion, anD laboR

gabRiela D. lemUS

Lemus examines the relationship between globalization and NAFTA, and their un-intended social and political consequences. First, she discusses the negative effects of free trade on the U.S. labor market, par-ticularly on manufacturing jobs. Next, she turns to Mexico, noting how poverty and emigration have increased since NAFTA started, and how the income gap between Mexico and its trade partners have wid-ened. Turning to the continuing process of integration, Lemus warns against allowing it to continue without democratic oversight by citizens and legislatures. Turning to al-ternatives, Lemus advocates the creation of truly global unions, to counteract the power of transnational corporations. The author ends by making recommendations to restore the role of the state in economic development, restore legislative oversight, improve accountability to the citizenry for further integration, and protect labor and migrants’ rights.

IntroductionThe problems related to NAFTA en-compass a complex world economy dominated by transnational corpora-tions (TNCs) and transnational capi-tal that can rival and often supersede government authority, although they customarily work hand-in-hand. Invari-ably, globalization proponents’ efforts to universalize neoliberal reforms and drive new markets place workers in the global North in direct competition with workers in the global South. This cre-ates a structure of asymmetrical econo-mies that is hard to overcome without new and creative efforts that can address the very asymmetries and the advan-tages given to capital currently in place. The benefits of such structures are un-evenly distributed, and the working class in rich and developing nations has the least access to the benefits of these global policies.

This chapter will examine the relation-ship between globalization, current trade policy models as delineated by NAFTA, and the unintended political and social consequences these have created. In the case of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, deepening integration promises to transform NAFTA into a mechanism that goes well beyond the original intent through the creation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).1 The pri-mary focus of this analysis is the bilat-eral relationship between Mexico and the United States within the context of NAF-TA, while its primary purpose is twofold: first, to provide some prescriptive analy-sis to contextualize the challenges cre-ated by the neoliberal frameworks that have become the prevailing measure for engaging in free-trade agreements, along with the growing power of TNCs and capital; and second, to provide guide-lines to build a sustainable global net-work of NGOs, local leaders, and unions to counter these efforts so as to create a united progressive international vision that restores dignity to workers and as-sures democracy to citizens.

When NAFTA was negotiated it was ac-companied by big expectations and big promises. The negotiators assured that NAFTA would reduce poverty in the re-gion, lessen income disparities and asym-metries between Mexico and the United States, and create more and better jobs for everyone; the biggest promise was the reduction of migration. Today, almost fifteen years after the implementation of the treaty, we know that most people in the region have not seen any of these benefits. But there is one area in particu-lar in which NAFTA failed drastically: migration. Since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, almost five hundred thousand Mexicans on average have crossed into the United States without

authorization each year.2 The total num-ber of immigrants from Mexico grew by 65 percent compared to the previous decade.3 NAFTA was supposed to solve many of Mexico’s development chal-lenges and alleviate immigration. At best the results have been mixed, with some states in the North experiencing growth, while the South has suffered. The lack of investment in infrastructure and in hu-man capital has equally inhibited growth and development in Mexico overall. The result is a weak and increasingly poor la-bor force that is struggling for a foothold in the global economy.

The United States since the Pas-sage of NAFTAAs a global leader, the United States is in a much different position than Mexico. The U.S. economy is the strongest in the world, yet it has become increasingly inhospitable for middle class Americans in the last decade. In the United States, between 2000 and 2007 alone, the coun-try lost 21 percent of its manufacturing jobs – the sort of high-paying blue collar jobs that provide retirement and health-care.4 More than forty thousand manu-facturing plants have shut down in the United States since 2000, causing the U.S. manufacturing base to slip down dramatically, from almost 30 percent of the nation’s GDP in 1950, to 12 percent in 2005.5

Part of the challenge the United States faces is the stunning loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs and its inability in the last decade to sustain a steady rhythm in raising median income and thus to sustain intergenerational mobility. The United States also faces difficulties in its ability to retain its position as a leading innovator in terms of research and tech-nology in relationship to the loss of its manufacturing base. Income distribution

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has steadily degenerated as well. Between 1980 and 2005, 82 percent of person-al income gains went to the top 1 percent of the popula-tion. While overall produc-tivity increased by 71% per-cent, the income of the top 1 percent increased by 156 percent. In contrast, median income compensation rose by only 19 percent for the rest of the population.6 Since the passage of NAFTA, the trade deficit in the United States has also steadily risen, although in large part be-cause of a combination of other factors that will not be discussed in depth in this analysis, except to say that for every extra $1 billion of the trade deficit, ten thou-sand jobs are lost.7 Growing trade deficits are responsible for 34–58 percent of the de-cline in U.S. manufacturing employment.8

How much these chal-lenges are directly related to NAFTA is hard to say but overall we do know that the United States has lost a little over 3.3 mil-lion manufacturing jobs since 1998.9 Even in states that depend heavily on ex-ports to Mexico, job loss has been critical. In Sep-tember 2007 alone, the United States lost eighteen thousand additional man-ufacturing jobs, putting employment in the sector below fourteen million for the first time since 1950.10

Now we are in a bind be-cause of the delicate situ-ation NAFTA and other mistaken economic policies have created. The trade defi-cit exceeded $700 billion in 2007 and international bor-rowing has increased to $5.6 trillion since 1994.11 This endangers U.S. economic independence, especially when the price of energy also continues to rise. Only by rapidly growing domestic manufacturing output can this unsustainable situation be reduced. Making a firm goal to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit by 2016 would mean the creation of mil-lions of new manufacturing jobs, which would help al-most all states in the union because of the significance of manufacturing’s position as a share of the GDP in the U.S. economy.12 If the United States con-tinues on a trajectory of deepening integration with Mexico, Canada, and the rest of the hemisphere via trade agreements, it is im-perative that it begin to turn around the downward spiral of manufacturing job loss or risk powerful dislocations in its own regional economies. The balance between U.S. exports, manufacturing jobs, and the concomitant im-pact on Mexico’s economy and society is inadequately addressed by NAFTA as a development instrument. This situation becomes

Cartoon by Rocha, courtesy of La Jornada.

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Mexico would catch up. While many in the United States, including some within then-President Clinton’s own circle of advisors, argued that NAFTA would be painfully unbalanced without the addition of strong and innovative labor and wage provisions, these con-cerns were ultimately cast aside and have never been revisited.14

Now, over a decade later, the people earning the minimum wage in Mexico – many of them in factories producing under NAFTA rules for the U.S. mar-ket – cannot sustain themselves. In the first decade of NAFTA the value of the Mexican minimum wage dropped 23 percent. Today one quarter of Mexicans cannot buy basic foods, and Mexico has nineteen million more people living in poverty than twenty years prior.15 Today, the GDP of the United States is eigh-teen times greater than that of Mexico and wages of U.S. workers on average are six times greater than those of Mexi-can workers.16 Migration has become an outlet for Mexico and U.S. businesses as a result.

Integration without Democracy = ChaosWhen only a handful of individuals make the decisions for the majority and then simultaneously fail to prepare the majority for the inevitable changes that will be brought about by those decisions, the possibility for extreme reactions grows larger. This has certainly been the case with NAFTA, and the impacts on immigration. Now, instead of learning a lesson and opening up trade policy to more scrutiny, the United States govern-ment – primarily, so far, the Bush admin-istration – has proceeded with further plans to deepen NAFTA with an even less democratic process – the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). This will inevitably create conflict. The same can be said in Mexico and Canada. Today, with the U.S. trade deficit in such a tenuous position, all of the North American market is at risk. The

challenge. Despite NAFTA’s ability to in-crease exports from Mexico to the United States and Canada, small- and medium-sized businesses have been closing at a rapid rate. These businesses used to pro-duce for the national market. They can no longer afford to do so. The number of jobs created through foreign invest-ment is grossly insufficient to absorb this redundant pool of labor, and the original gains in real wages made in these indus-tries made the corporations more willing to relocate to lower-wage countries.

Originally the asymmetries in the econ-omies of the United States and Mexico were not addressed during the negotia-tions. Given the foreign investor guar-antees that were supposed to draw new foreign direct investment, the trade agreement was supposed to bring abun-dant prosperity to Mexico as a result of the jobs it would help create. The bal-ancing act between the two countries was supposed to happen naturally. It was widely assumed that there was no need to compensate for the enormous disparities between the two economies.

particularly relevant when the issue of immigration is added to the equation.

Trade, Poverty, and ImmigrationNAFTA opened a Pandora’s box—it brought together Canada, Mexico, and the United States with no appar-ent thought about the social and politi-cal consequences. President Salinas de Gortari stated very clearly that Mexico “would export goods, not people.” How wrong he was. Since the 1990s, emigration from Mexico has increased substantially. It is estimated that there are approximately 12 million unau-thorized workers in the United States today – a vast majority from Mexico.13

Despite denials by the World Bank and other NAFTA apologists, there is an ir-refutable connection between a liberal trade policy, poverty, and immigration in Mexico. Trade liberalization policies combined with weak economic devel-opment policies since the implementa-tion of NAFTA have contributed to the growing poverty of Mexican laborers. Businesses in Mexico are facing a serious

Local farmers, devastated by competition from U.S. industrial agriculture, scrape by in San Martin Peras, Oaxaca. Photo by David Cilia.

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markets to international markets where investors view a world without borders. These capital investors and shareholders have little loyalty to the local markets in which they operate and apparently have even less interest in or commitment to the sustainable development of that market.

Improving the solidarity of workers across national borders has become a priority. Over the last couple of decades, corporate globalization has proven counterproductive to the well-being of workers—in effect, it allows for exploitation because of the fo-cus on shareholder profits and worksite mobility. When the value of a human be-ing is downgraded to that of a commodity within the global context, the best vehicle to empower workers to fight for universal worker rights is better cross-border organi-zation and solidarity of unions.

Yet never before has the connection between governments and global in-stitutions (WTO, IMF, and the World Bank) been so strong and interests so

reactive. So, what can be done to restore balance to the economic development process of deepening integration, while ensuring that discourse be created to shape our collective future?

Global Unions: Challenging the Neoliberal Status Quo The international trade union movement provides one of the possible options avail-able to counteract the negative effects of globalization on the working class. It has the history, infrastructure, and orga-nization to propose a new way forward to redress the problem by restoring the human element to today’s standard eco-nomic practices.

In an era of globalization and global cor-porate lobbying, the transnational labor movement is critical. Today developing nations compete to attract investment by promising low wages without union representation, something that affects workers in both developed and develop-ing nations. Globalization has changed how business is practiced, from domestic

arguments made by the North Ameri-can Competitiveness Council (NACC), a free trade-booster group of multi-national corporations, suddenly may appear more viable to some17—at least they have a plan. However it is no lon-ger possible to engage in business as usual. After a decade of failure of the current combination of undemocratic decision-making and free-market fun-damentalism, there is no reason to be-lieve that more of the same will have any significantly different outcome. There is a serious need to rethink and remodel current economic interactions. To paraphrase Jeff Faux, we must pull back from the current pursuit of corpo-rate-dominated globalization in order to correct the current regional economy.

In the case of the SPP, not only have “individuals”—the citizenry—been de-liberately left out of the decision-making processes, the U.S. Congress has not even been engaged. The leaders of the NAFTA countries are abrogating the mandates they have been handed by taking the politically expedient route of secrecy in their discussions with large transnational corporations to deepen integration. They facilitate the terms of the latter without any counterweights to support harmed sectors (labor) that are strategic to all three countries. It is not surprising, then, that they are not addressing the critical issues of labor rights and the movement of peoples. In so doing, they avoid dif-ficult and contentious social and political discussions, and make it impossible that any changes to NAFTA will successfully address the concerns of the vast majority of working people in the United States, much less in all three countries. In their secrecy, they forget the lesson from NAF-TA: policies that are adopted for short-term political convenience inadvertently self-destruct.

Increasingly, the decision makers lead-ing us toward deepening integration will have to deal with the grievances of the people against their policies. Better to do so in a proactive manner than one that is

Local farmers, devastated by competition from U.S. industrial agriculture, scrape by in San Martin Peras, Oaxaca. Photo by David Cilia.

88 T h e R i g h T T o S T a y h o m e

firms.” Fifty-one proposals were accepted at the conference.20 This conference can serve as the foundation for the needed in-tellectual framework to better understand how to navigate global forces in order to have a stronger and better organized in-ternational union movement.

Recommendations• Restore the role of the state in eco-

nomic development. Globalization and trade policies as engaged in today affect small- and medium-sized busi-nesses adversely. Because of the way that NAFTA was set up originally, all three countries have weakened their ability to engage in economic poli-cies that support job creation. Public policy should place the lives and live-lihoods of its citizens first, and the citizens should make explicit the pri-orities of the implicit social contract between themselves and their respec-tive governments.

• Restore oversight to the legislative bod-ies in all three countries. Support leg-islative policies that redress the gaps in the ability to negotiate agreements and restore the legislatures’ role in over-sight. The different legislative bodies should be encouraged to pursue vary-ing types of analyses with the goal of creating positive policy that can restore the local to the global. Legislators need to reengage in the dynamics taking place around issues like the creation of regional markets and trade policies that affect them in their hometowns. They are the ones who must answer to constituents when there are significant job losses.

• Engender healthy public discourse to the SPP process and facilitate the building of transnational civil soci-ety dialogue and coalition building. Deepening integration between NAF-TA partners requires a restoration of public discourse to ensure that citizens of all three countries have an oppor-tunity to understand and halt any policy that harms the public good. Members of the legislatures, labor, civil and human rights organizations,

most unions have primarily acted within national boundaries, with only sporadic connections to workers from other na-tions. That must change. The reach of the movement must transcend national borders and become global. Workers’ struggles are a global problem that can be tackled by globalizing unions and ex-panding on the solidarity efforts that are currently taking place.

In the case of Mexico and its record of systematic violations of labor rights, the government has touted sovereignty and intervention over national issues as an excuse to prevent foreign unions from working in solidarity with Mexican workers. In the context of NAFTA, this is unjust.

In the United States, twelve million un-documented workers exist as an under-class exploited by U.S. and transnational corporations. The pressures of globaliza-tion force companies to focus on reduc-ing costs and not investing in domestic growth. These pressures simultaneously decrease wages and engender job loss in both Mexico and the United States, and have led to a decade of rapid import growth of both goods and workers.

Labor unions and organizations that seek to protect and empower workers must become as ubiquitous and mobile as TNCs, going to where the need exists and protecting workers on a global scale, regardless of the country where they relo-cate. We must join forces to prevent and stop the inhumane exploitation of work-ers worldwide, and demand and help to establish the de-facto observance of uni-versal labor rights throughout the globe.

The 2006 Global Companies–Global Unions–Global Research–Global Cam-paigns conference in New York was an effort to strengthen labor capacity for cross-border campaigns. One of the con-ference’s accomplishments was the agree-ment to generate “high quality research on labor’s efforts to date at running cross-border campaigns with transnational

clearly tied to transnational corpora-tions. There is sufficient evidence dem-onstrating that these are not the best policies for most workers in the world. There is a need for new international policies that allow most of the popula-tion to share the benefits.

American Federation of Labor and Con-gress of Industrial Organization Secre-tary Treasurer Richard Trumka charged: “Global companies begat global prob-lems for worker—global problems begat the need for global unions—and if global unions want to truly match the might and power of global corporations, we have to undertake global research and global campaigns.”18

Despite efforts in the past, global cor-porate forces have been much more suc-cessful and better organized than labor, and obviously have much greater funds to invest in the promotion of their own interests. The effect has been a serious negative impact on the economic, social, and political rights of workers all over the world.

Neoliberal policies with a strong focus on market fundamentalism have proven themselves unsustainable and unwork-able for most people. Such policies were supposed to reduce poverty. In real-ity, over the last decade of the twentieth century, the number of people living in poverty in the world increased by almost one hundred million; over the same pe-riod, the average income in the world increased by 2.5 percent annually. The benefits of such policies were not being equitably distributed but rather accumu-lated in the hands of very few.19

The movement therefore must seek to maximize the prosperity for the maxi-mum number of people and globalize labor rights, human rights, and envi-ronmental standards. Unions have the capacity to serve as a multinational force that can set the agenda to ensure certain minimum standards for work-ers all around the world. Until recently,

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other NGOs, academics, and public intellectuals should be involved in the discussions related to the SPP.

• Immigration, labor rights, and envi-ronmental protections need to be at the core of the discussion. By not tak-ing into account immigration, labor standards, and the environment in the subsequent discussion on how we are going to manage the North American regional economy, we miss out on a very rich debate whereby security and prosperity can indeed be attained be-cause of real partnerships and good-will. Innovation in technology and a shift in focus of production toward a green economy can, for example, create new and better jobs while ad-dressing climate change. A general, minimum standard of labor rights of all workers without exception across all three borders would lead to a more level playing field and, one hopes, have the effect of lessening exploita-tion. Labor has a powerful role to play in balancing the conditions estab-lished by transnational corporations. Discussions of regional markets by their very nature should include the social, political, and economic con-texts because as integration deepens traditional decision-making structures will be put into flux.

Neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, now largely considered the status quo, have begun to lose their luster. The time is right for a new plan of action. NAFTA is not going away but there are important lessons to be learned. The trade agreement needs to be reexam-ined, reevaluated, and renegotiated in certain areas, particularly as pertains to agriculture and labor rights. The SPP is an example of how renegotiations happen all the time, only the public is largely unaware that it is happening. It is the responsibility of the citizens and the labor movement to set the tone and the agenda for the future of the region— without fear.

Cartoon by Rocha, courtesy of La Jornada.

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notes

Since 2005, the prime minister of Canada and the presidents of Mexico and the United States have been meeting on a fairly regular basis 1. to discuss the deepening integration of all three countries following the same policies. In the popular vernacular, the SPP is referred to as NAFTA Plus.Global Exchange, 2. Rethinking the Immigration Debate: Addressing the Root Causes of Mexican Migration, http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/TM2pager.pdf. Global Exchange, 3. U.S.-Mexico Trade and Migration Fact Sheet, http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/factsheet.pdf. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4. March 2008 Current Employment Statistics Survey, 2008, http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2008/Employ-ment-Statistics-BLS4apr08.htm. Michael Mandel, “How Low Can Manufacturing Go?,” 5. BusinessWeek, November 23, 2007, http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2005/11/how_low_can_man.html.Susan Helper, “Renewing U.S. Manufacturing: Promoting a High-Road Strategy,” EPI Briefing Paper #212 (Washington, DC: Eco-6. nomic Policy Institute, 2008). Marcy Kaptur, Comments at the conference “Linking Agriculture, Development, and Migration: A Critical Look at NAFTA Past, Pres-7. ent and Future,” March 5, 2008.Jacob Hill, “Evaluation of the Impact of NAFTA on Manufacturing,” 8. Scoop Independent News, August 9, 2007.Susan Helper, “Renewing U.S. Manufacturing Promoting a High Road Strategy,” 9. EPI Briefing Paper (Economic Policy Institute, 2008). Christian E. Weller, “Ignore at Your Own Peril: The Manufacturing Crisis in Perspective,” Center for American Progress, February 6, 10. 2004, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/02/b27975.html.U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, April 2008.” U.S. Depart-11. ment of Commerce, June 10, 2008, http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/ft900.pdf. Robert E. Scott, “The Importance of Manufacturing: Key to Recovery in the States and the Nation,” 12. EPI Briefing Paper #211 (Washing-ton, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2008).Global Exchange, 13. U.S.-Mexico Trade and Migration Fact Sheet, http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/factsheet.pdf.John R. MacAurthur, 14. The Selling of “Free Trade”: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).Global Exchange. 15. Rethinking the Immigration Debate: Addressing the Root Causes of Mexican Migration, http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/TM2pager.pdf. Andrew Selee, 16. More than Neighbors: An Overview of Mexico and U.S.-Mexico Relations, (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2008), iii. The North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) is made up of thirty presidents and CEOs of major corporations, ten from each 17. country respectively.Kate Bronfenbrenner, ed., 18. Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital Through Cross-Border Campaign (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press and Cornell University Press, 2007). Joseph Stiglitz, 19. Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Bronfenbrenner.20.

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DaviD bacon is a senior fellow at the Oakland Insti-tute, which provided support for this analysis. He is a writer, photojournalist, and former labor organizer. The issues raised in this article are discussed at greater depth in Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Im-migrants (Beacon Press, September 2008).

aRmanDo baRTRa is a distinguished Mexican scholar and public intellectual. He is a professor of sociology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, the founder of the Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo Rural Maya, and the editor of the La Jornada del Campo supplement of one of Mexico’s most respected and widely read dailies.

laURa caRlSen is the director of the Center for In-ternational Policy’s Mexico City-based Americas Program. She is one of the leading critics of the NAFTA-based development model in Mexico and Latin America, and has written exten-sively on Mexican society and politics.

gUSTavo eSTeva is a renowned social activist and public intellectual based in the city of Oaxaca. He is a lead-ing critic of the economic uprooting of indigenous commu-nities across Mexico, founder of the Oaxacan Universidad de la Tierra, and former adviser to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

TeD leWiS directs Global Exchange’s Human Rights Pro-grams. He writes regularly on the linkages between economic policy and human rights.

beRTha lUJán is Mexico’s best-known independent labor organizer and former director of the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, a large, democratic labor union. She is the chief la-bor advisor to the “parallel government” organization of 2006 presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Jeff faUx is the founder and distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute. He is the author of The Global Class War, and has written and lectured extensively on the economic and social consequences of globalization.

gabRiela lemUS is executive director at the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and former direc-tor of Policy and Legislation at the League of United Latin American Citizens. She has broad experience advocating for Latino workers and families on issues related to globalization, trade, immigration, and border militarization.

bill ong hing is a professor of law at the University of California at Davis. Throughout his career, he has success-fully pursued social justice by combining community work, litigation, and scholarship. He is the founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

oScaR chacón is the executive director of the Na-tional Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communi-ties. Amy Shannon previously served as the director of Enlaces America and currently works as a consultant on development and environmental issues.

maRía DoloReS PaRíS is Professor of Social Rela-tions at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Her research on Mexican migration to the United States focuses on human rights, gender, and ethnicity.

John gibleR is a Global Exchange Media fellow who writes from Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, forthcoming from City Lights.

Dan la boTZ teaches history and Latin American stud-ies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of several books on Mexican labor unions, social movements and politics, and edits Mexican Labor News and Analysis, an on-line publication of the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT).

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