NAFTA and the Immigration Debate

The immigration issue is front and center in the current Republican primaries.'The Mexicans are taking over', they cry. 'They are draining the health care resources everywhere', they shout. 'Mexican criminals are everywhere!', they scream. Of course this plays well with some in their base who love this new form of racism.

It is stupid to put the blame on immigrants that are, indeed, streaming across the border. No, they are not coming to take advantage of the 'freedom and opportunity' in this land of 'milk and honey'. They are coming out of economic necessity. The failed U.S. trade policies pursued that only take into account corporate profits have put whole economies, for example in Mexico, in dire straits. The following article looks at this situation closely.

Francisco Cruz gave up his farm more than a decade ago.

Then 20, Cruz had been earning a living as a sharecropper in Oaxaca, giving half his harvest to the landowner. It was a subsistence living that he supplemented by working in construction.

But when his wife Azucena announced she was pregnant, he realized his fledgling family could not survive on his meager earnings from the cornfield. Cruz emigrated to Monterey County, a year after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

His story is not unique. In the last 13 years, 2 million peasants left Mexico's countryside in search of better opportunities in larger employment centers in Mexico or in the United States, according to Mexico's Statistics Institute. The undocumented population in the U.S. is now estimated at 12 million.

Some experts believe the immigration dilemma could be better understood — and perhaps resolved — if more attention was paid to the economic circumstances that bring people here.

According to analysts, millions of farmers like Cruz are the casualties of a tide of multinational circumstance: NAFTA, the U.S. Farm Bill and a dearth of effective economic initiatives in Mexico.

The combination, which allows for the consolidation of markets, has made it easier for large corporations and farm operations to expand their reach but almost impossible for small producers to survive. These subsistence farmers in turn have abandoned their land in search of better opportunities.

Critics point to NAFTA as the biggest example. The "free trade" agreement was promoted as a win-win for both Mexico and the United States, expected to spark an economic renaissance in Mexico and slow the migration of job-hungry Mexicans to the U.S.

Instead, according to the critics, NAFTA actually launched a new wave of immigration among undercapitalized farmers in Mexico's agrarian countryside who found it impossible to compete with subsidized U.S. products.

"What essentially happened was, as peasant farmers found it harder to make a living, ... more family members were sent off the farm to make money to support the family," said Timothy Wise, deputy director of the Global Development and Environmental Institute at Tufts University. "More of those family members headed for the United States because Mexico was not creating jobs at the rate NAFTA promised."

It is ironic to watch Republicans (and some Democrats, I might add) scream about illegal immigration on one hand, and support these massive corporate policies that create the problem on the other.