Peasant agriculture has been eviscerated by the arrival of agri-business and the
lifting of restrictions on the sale of peasant land. Industrial employment has been eviscerated by the closure of hundreds of plants unable to compete with the transnationals under the new free-for-all trade regime. The response of
peasants and workers thus displaced has been clear and consistent:
they have headed north in ever greater absolute numbers. Before NAFTA, undocumented Mexican immigration came mainly from four or five Mexican states and a limited number of mostly rural municipalities. Since NAFTA, migrants have originated in all Mexican states, practically all municipalities, and cities as well as towns and villages.
A number of formerly vibrant places are now ghost towns, all their able adults having gone abroad; about one-third of all Mexican municipalities have lost population during the last decade, some by half or more. The counterpart of this
hollowing out of the Mexican countryside is the growth of the Mexican migrant population in the U.S., much of it undocumented. From a purely regional presence in the west and southwest, it has become a truly national phenomenon. States that had barely a handful of “Hispanics” in 1990 now count a sizable Hispanic population. In Georgia, for example, the Latin-origin population went from 1.7 percent in 1990 to 5.3 percent in 2000, a 312 percent increase due to an inflow of 300,000 persons, overwhelmingly from Mexico. Cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, whose “Hispanics” in 1990 consisted of a few wealthy Cuban and South American professionals, now have upwards of 80,000, mostly undocumented Mexican laborers.
American media commentators and policy pundits attack the migrants themselves for their presence and greater visibility. They are dubbed “law-breakers” and accused of “taking jobs away from Americans.” But this is just another exercise in victim-blaming. Those truly responsible for the situation are the authorities who embraced free markets as a cure for all economic and social ills. Government officials on both sides who promoted and signed the NAFTA treaty were either guilty of shortsightedness for swallowing the ideological pap purveyed by some academic economists about the “magic” of markets (from which these tenured economists are themselves well protected) or of deliberate deceit. Protected by ideological bromides about “open trade” and “trickle-down wealth,” the balance sheets of many corporations and the salaries of their CEOs and CFOs have grown relentlessly healthier. As the decade progressed, they were increasingly able to pay lower wages on both sides of the border; neatly bypass environmental controls and labor protection codes; and market their wares unhindered here and there. By the same token, state and local governments were set to compete with one another to keep or attract a few industrial plants in a futile race to the bottom.
http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Portes/Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. He is the author of some 220 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. His most recent book, co-authored with Rubén G. Rumbaut, is Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation and Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (California, 2001).
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NAFTA provided a radically different competitive environment for many of Mexico's domestic industries that caused severe dislocations. The most widespread may have been in the agricultural sector where millions of campesinos depended on the sale of grain for income. Farmers who could not afford motorized equipment found themselves in competiton with the great grain producing combines of the U.S. and Canadian Midwest. Previous to NAFTA, the communal farming lands (Eijidos) had been secured to the campesinoes "in perpetuity" by Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917. Regarding this as economically inefficient, the planners of the Salinas regime revoked this provision as part of the implementing legislation for NAFTA. Thus NAFTA implementation meant not only that many of Mexico's small farmers became economically obsolete but that their ancestral lands could be seized by the large landowners for debts. An analysis of the impact by Professor Calva (3) indicated that a total population of
10 million small grain farmers would be at risk of being forced off the land due to NAFTA. Indeed the grain imports from the U.S. and Canada had by 1995 already captured over one third of the Mexican grain market.
The impact of the invasion of U.S. businesses on other domestic Mexican businesses was also severe. After NAFTA, retailers like Walmart expanded rapidly in Mexico to much U.S. publicity. This expansion was fueled by their ability to sell goods at prices significantly lower than their Mexican competitors. Walmart managed to cut a wide swath in domestic Mexican retailers until an investigation revealed that their goods were largely manufactured in China and the Mexican government imposed a 300% duty on all goods imported from China. After the
economic depression in the second year of NAFTA, Mexico had lost well over a million jobs in a country where over a million young people enter the job market every year (5). It's not surprising that under these circumstances the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico has sharply increased.http://www.siliconv.com/trade/tradepapers/immigration.html
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