By Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow
that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages
for workers both north and south of the border. The role of
the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed “free
trade” has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter
debate over the fate of America’s 11 to 12 million illegal
aliens.
NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula
that would improve the American economy at the same time it
would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has
come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement
before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of
all workers affected.
While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA’s ruinous
impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less
media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:
 NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn
and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican
farmers, has driven off the land Mexican farmer due to
low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products.
Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture,
and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty.
These people are among those that cross the border to feed
their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices
climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called
NAFTA their “death warrant.”)
 NAFTA’s service-sector rules allowed big firms
like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling
low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to
displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An
estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses
have been eliminated.
.
 Wages along the Mexican border have actually been
driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie
Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the
crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has
resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border
where wages typically run 60 to $1 cents an hour.
So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have
actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number
of jobs has leveled off, with China’s even more repressive
labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.
But Mexicans must still contend with the results of the
American-owned “maquiladora” sweatshops: subsistence-level
wages, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions
(cardboard shacks and open sewers), and a lack of resources
(for streetlights and police) to deal with a wave of violence
against vulnerable young women working in the factories. The
survival (or less)-level wages coupled with harsh working
conditions have not been the great answer to Mexican poverty,
while they have temporarily been the answer to Corporate
America’s demand for low wages.
With US firms unwilling to pay even minimal taxes, NAFTA has
hardly produced the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans.
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, whose city is crammed
with US-owned low-wage plants, expressed it plainly: “We have
no way to provide water, sewage, and sanitation workers. Every
year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and
more wealth.”
Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small
businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct
consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so
many desperate Mexicans—lured to the border area in the false
hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras
are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide
for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in
1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005,
some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.
NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it
was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to
promote rising living standards, health care, environmental
cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico.The wholesale surge of
Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA
was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and
democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned
corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the
border.
NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial
suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to
heavily-subsidized US agribusiness products, blowing away
local producers. Capital could flow freely across the border
freely to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but
the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican
workers.
Meanwhile, with the planned Central American Free Trade
Agreement with five Central American nations coming up, we can
anticipate even greater pressure on our borders as
agricultural workers are pushed off the land without positive,
alternative employment opportunities. People from Guatemala
and Honduras will soon learn that they can’t compete for
industrial jobs with the most oppressed people in say, China,
by agreeing to lowering their wages even more. Further,
impoverished Central American countries don’t have the
resources to deal with the pollution and crime that results
from moving people from rural areas to the city, often without
their families.
Thus far, we have been presented with a narrow range of
options to cope with the tide of illegal immigrants living
fearfully in the shadows of American life. Should they simply
be walled off and criminalized, as Sensenbrenner and House
Republicans suggest? The Sensenbrenner option seeks to exploit
the sentiment that illegal immigrants entering the US—rather
than US corporation exiting the US for Mexico and China—are
the primary cause of falling wages for most Americans.
The Bush version is only slightly different, envisioning the
illegal immigrants as part of a vast disposable pool of cheap
labor with no meaningful rights on the job or even the right
to vote, to be returned to Mexico upon the whim of their
employers.
Yet there is another well-known path of economic and social
integration that has been ignored in the debates over
immigration in the US: the one followed by the European Union
and their “social charter” calling for decent wages, health
care, and extensive retraining in all nations. Before
then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were
admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads,
health care, clean water, and education. The implementation of
democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital
pre-condition for entry into the EU.
The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to
provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the
cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to
question the widely-held assumption that what benefits
American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American
workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn’t
about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and
a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of
family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy
environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary
people being able to achieve their dreams.
The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely
one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs—not
maximum profits-- are not the ultimate goal but a subject of
neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor
a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems
ignited by NAFTA.
Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern
transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are
needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and
allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native
land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is
truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead
of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom.
Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter are Milwaukee-based writers and
activists. They can be reached at winterbybee@earthlink.net.
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