Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There
By Jim Hightower
The Hightower Lowdown
Thursday 07 February 2008
Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America’s problems, let’s look at executives on both sides of the border.
The wailing in our country about the “invasion of immigrants” has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, “Few of their children in the country learn English …The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
That’s not some diatribe from one of today’s Republican presidential candidates. It’s the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they’ve flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W’s current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness – around the time of the nation’s founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”
Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public’s anxiety and simmering anger about today’s massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.
Wedge Issue
There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show – as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country – that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they’re not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.
For the GOP candidates in this year’s presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on “English-only” proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.
The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congress-critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he’d scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are “pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives,” and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: “Deport those who don’t belong. Make sure they never come back.” As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term “illegal” is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as “aliens.” Tancredo doesn’t merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are “coming to kill me and you and your children.” Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, “You bet!”
At least he’s taken a position, even if it’s un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party’s candidates either to adopt the Republican’s punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.
Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policy makers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.
We’ve had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cookoff that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.
There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn’t take many beers before the first-ever “Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest” was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.
Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Co. (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) is putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60 billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It’s a monster wall – two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.
The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it’s being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush’s Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water and National Historic Preservation Acts.
All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it’s not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.
Why?
The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it’s huge if you’re trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.
Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: “Up north, even though they pay more, you’re not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it’s comfortable. Life is easier.”
Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican – yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.
Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico’s longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and “free market” ideologues. In the name of “modernizing” the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE – in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico – have laid waste to that country’s grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.
The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico’s ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong:
Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since ’94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA.
Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.
Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.
So, here’s the deal: Thanks to Mexico’s newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?
The Wrong Debate
In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our “leaders” have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.
Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up – up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.
In the United States, the middle class feels imperiled because … well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people’s financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:
“We’ve replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can’t afford to get sick; our kids can’t afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can’t afford a new one; our kids can’t buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing.”
It’s this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country – none – the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:
Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs.
Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts.
Stopped enforcement of America’s wage and hour laws.
Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations.
Illegally reclassified millions of employees as “independent contractors,” leaving them with no benefits or labor rights.
Subverted the right of workers to organize.
Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.
Made good healthcare a luxury item.
Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties.
Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.
Powerless immigrants didn’t do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the United States, now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:
Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP’s executives transformed this beneficial model into today’s profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws, and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20 years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer “accidents”).
The Fix
Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can’t fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws – from wage and hour rules to the NLRB – so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.
Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an “immigration policy” that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.
We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides – to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru, a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.
America’s immigration problem is not down on the border, it’s in Washington and on Wall Street.
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From “The Hightower Lowdown,” edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, January 2008. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008)
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I have always liked Jim Hightower and in some respects he is right on the causes of illegal immigration. But his solution is a liberal do good pipe dream. There is no way the American elite are going to force the elite of Mexico to change their ways. Both sides profit from the invasion of our country by mostly uneducated peasant workers. The Democratic Party embraces the idea of more Dem voters, The Republicans fight for the cheap labor. Both sides like the idea of more tax payers and consumers. Mexican elite like pushing their poor underclass problems across the border. They also enjoy the benefit of the 20 billion dollars of remittances wired to Mexico in 2006. Neither political party thinks about the long term consequence of increased population both illegal and legal. Greed and the human desire for more power makes Hightower’s approach unrealistic.
While Tancredo is wrong on many subjects, immigration is not one of them.
As to the fence, anyone who has actually been on the border can testify to the destruction illegal immigration has done to the ecology. There are wilderness areas that are completely trampled by border crossers and illegal drug vehicles. The amounts of trash left by illegal border crossers is staggering. Tons and tons in some frequently crossed areas. Most heavily used areas would only be slightly impacted by the fence. Many areas would actually begin a process of recovery because of less human activity.
As to unions, I have been a union supporter all my life. But todays unions are not the unions of yesterday. All todays unions care about is their membership numbers and the dues they generate. The people at the top live like their corporate counterparts, while the membership’s wages continue to decline. Unions do not care about their American workers, it is just about the numbers. It is about the money, not where it comes from. Economics 101 shows us that an increase in labor numbers regardless of unions means a decrease in wages or an increase in unemployment. What good would it do to have a good union contract, be a union member, if you can’t remain employed?
In the end the best solution is to enforce the laws we have, build the fence to help the border patrol and seek more penalties against the employers of illegal aliens. Legislative fixes such as an amnesty, path to citizenship, earned legality or what ever name is flavor of the month is wrong. It sends the wrong message across the border and rewards law breakers.
Brad seems like a nice reasonable guy, he’s willing to give Hightower some credit for being right about the roots of the surge of immigration from Mexico but then he tells us first that Hightower is dreaming, and that any solution is impossible because we’re up against greed and human nature.
Of course we’re up against greed and human nature and we have been for as long as people have been on this earth, so we should stop looking for solutions Brad? Come on, don’t be so defeatist. If Hightower is right that desperate people won’t stop coming until they can feed their families by staying home in Mexico or Honduras, Guatemala, etc. then let’s start having a discussion about our foreign policy which buys elites and bullies countries to accept the marvels of NAFTA, CAFTA, the IMF, and debt slavery. All of these things have, in the last twenty-five years hollowed out their economies and left their people with few alternatives but to work in sweatshops that pay five dollars a day, sell tacos on the street or make the long trek through the desert to a place where they live in fear, are worked like dogs, and abused by Americans who think they’re better then immigrants. I bet Brad, you’d even agree, that you have to be really desperate to make that choice.
I agree with Brad on one thing: the political cowardice of most politicians in both major parties who compete with each other to see who can be more abusive to immigrants rather than look at the real problems we face which have nothing to do with immigrants, problems like health care, declining wages (which started way before the immigrant surge), climate change, and corporate control of just about everything.
Brad, politicians and people like Chris Simcox don’t want to open this can of worms so they take the lazy way out and blame the immigrants, build a wall and don’t ever reform our broken, outdated immigration law. Brad adds that we should punish employers even more than they already are (what’s two times zero?)
So say you get your way and all the undocumented suddenly get wafted across the borders (Actually you should waft a bunch over the oceans and our northern border since there are hundreds of thousands of unauthorized workers from Canada, Poland, Ireland and other places who are white and somehow never mentiond.) So say 10-12 million undocumented MEXICANS are gone. Who is going to do the work? Who is going to clean the hotel rooms, wash the dishes, cut the lawns, build the wall, and pick your tomatoes? Is anyone in the Tancredo camp even thinking about this question while they call the people who provide them with their fresh veggies and clean sheets criminals? No. The Tancredos have poisoned the dialogue so much that we can’t even have that conversation and come up with a sane, workable immigration policy.
That would be AMNESTY you say. God forbid someone who commits the civil infraction of being here without papers gets to settle their case. We wouldn’t do that for a traffic violator which is a similar infraction. God forbid the few dozen people who we actually catch red handed in the act of setting foot in the US without authorization and who are therefore guilty of a federal MISDEMEANOR should never get out of jail or get to pay their fine because that would be AMNESTY. If any path to legalization is considered amnesty (which is what Tancredo, Sensenbrenner, Lou Dobbs and their ilk all say), if you rule out any resolution,. then there’s no way any one of these millions can get authorized to be here and work then we just have to deport them all and have huge sweeps through my community and yours to round them up and hold them in jail while they have hearings and put all their citizen kids in foster homes (or do we lock them up too?) and then send all or most them away and who will do their jobs? Do you really think those same greedy employers will voluntarily hire Americans and pay higher wages without enforcing our also very broken labor laws? In fact, a realistic scenario is that those jobs which are moveable will follow the deportees, just like a number of ag business jobs already have. They might go into our prisons where there’s lots of cheap labor, or they may just go under the table where even more desperate near slaves who get over, under or around the wall or who evade the roundups will work completely off the books and in the shadows, cheaper and not even paying taxes on phony social security numbers. That’s a realistic prediction of what Brad’s solution would bring. And is this the kind of society we want to become? Maybe we should just make anyone who looks like he or she might be here without documents wear their green card on their shirt so we don’t needlessly profile the innocent.
I think it would be far more realistic to face up to the elites of all our countries and tell them we want a sensible approach to labor which protects our rights and the rights of migrants and which forces those elites to share some of the vast wealth they’ve accumulated in this age of globalization. Brad is right, elites won’t do that voluntarily. That’s why we need a movement which includes us and Mexicans and Central Americans, and hopefully the Canadians, Poles and Irish as well which is strong enough to force the elites to change. Who knows, it’s happened before, in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, and that’s no pipe dream.
You should know that we, Montana Women For, received two comments that were so racist and irrational as to be unprintable. This is clearly a hot-button issue for many Americans. So please know that the following remarks are NOT from Montana Women For, but are from me, Margie Kidder, a member of MWF.
I was an illegal immigrant for ten years. It was impossible for me to enter the USA legally. Unless you can prove that no American can do the work you do, you are barred from entering. So I lied. I said I was born in the USA. In fact I was born in Canada. This was an accepted way of gaining entry way back then in 1967. The studio that had hired me, United Artists, encouraged it.
These days, with the rage at illegal immigrants reaching hysterical levels, I find myself in a quandry. I am an American now, but when I hear people ranting against Mexican illegals and I state, “But I was an illegal immigrant”, I am inevitably told that ” You’re different. That’s not what I am talking about.”
What they never say is “You are different because you are white. Your parents were in a position to give you a good education.”
The racism underlying so many of the anti-immigration arguements is obscene. Yet it is never stated as racism – it is couched in endless statistics and “facts” garnered from those who watch the one-sided rants of Lou Dobbs on CNN. Trust me, the basis for the “We can’t have amnesty for illegal immigrants!” is racist. Jon Tester and others like him just haven’t fully figured that out.
Nationalism on a rabid scale such as that we justify these days, and mistakenly call patriotism, is horribly anti humanitarianism. It is an obscenity.
The issue of immigration is a multi- sided dilema. It is not, as we have been led to beleive by a sold out media, an issue of “You’re either for it or against it.” Lets stop being simple minded fools. Lets look at all sides of this and refudiate the LEFT vs. RIGHT formulas imposed on us by CNN, FOX NEWS, NBC, CBS, and ABC.
Let us actually beleive in the process of THINKING.
Judy, Obviously you mean well, but good intentions aren’t always the best solution. Population increases, legal, illegal or native born is currently the most serious problem we as Americans face. It is the 800 pound gorilla, that few want to discuss. It is the root of many of the other problems that we as a people/country/world face.
Stagnant wages, over crowded schools, the climbing prices of health insurance, basic necessities & energy costs can all be attributed to population increase. More demand and fewer supplies always leads to price hikes. Surplus labor alway leads to depressed wages or unemployment. Global warming was a hot topic this past year, no pun intended. What causes global warming? The bottom line: world wide population increases.
Currently the southern US is in a drought. The Southwest has been in one for more then a decade. Here in Ca even if we have a record snowfall in the Sierra Nevada this year there isn’t enough water. The drought will continue.
Now I don’t know what part of the US you live in, but I suspect it’s in the northwestern US. After all this is the Montana Women for site. If it is great, if not please bear with me. I have friends and family who live in that neck of the woods, so I expect you live there for the same reasons they do. It is because you enjoy the clean air, clean water, open spaces and a less dense population.
Lets say we allow everyone who came here illegally to stay. Then we allow them to bring in their family. You know grand parents, uncles & aunts, brothers, sisters. Then we allow those people to bring in husbands, wives, children, parents. This just continues on and on.
According to the research it takes 12 acres of undeveloped land to be developed for each new person. That figure remains constant regardless of whether they are native born, legal or illegal. So where do we get the resources to take care of all these people? Estimates also show that if we amnesty the people who are here and allow them to bring their families, the US population will increase by another 100 million in the next 50/60 years. That includes the immigrant children and their children.
Now suppose we allow this unending population increase. Would you like Montana’s population to become that of California or New York? Would you be willing to allow your rivers and lakes to be drained to feed the southern population? How about the housing? How much of your forests would be left after needing lumber to build housing for another 100 million? America is like a life boat. Eventually it will take on too many people and capsize.
Now perhaps you have been to the southern border of the US, perhaps not. But let me tell you many parts of it you wouldn’t recognize as being part of America. There are entire towns with third world health and crime issues. Now it is easy when you are up in the north to say anyone who wants to control the southern border is a racist. It is easy call a person a bigot because they want illegal aliens to be repatriated to their home countries. That is because you are not living with it on a day to day basis and are uninformed. How many rural Montana ranchers would put up with their livestock being killed, fences and buildings destroyed, their property being trashed by an influx of illegal border crossers? Property owners along the Mexican border put up with it everyday. Many have to carry a loaded sidearm when traveling on their own property. There have been over 200 documented incursions of armed Mexican Army soldiers on US soil. Some close to border ranches. How would you feel about if if it was happening on your property or in your neighborhood?
Margot mentioned how she was once illegal. Did she come here and start waving the Canadian flag? Did she demand that we change our laws to accommodate her? Did she expect us to publish and speak her language if different from English? The answer is probably no. The only similarities between an illegal coming from Canada and an illegal from Mexico/South America is the fact they are illegal. Canadian culture, much like European culture is much more like American culture. Canadians, Aussies, Europeans assimilate faster and easier because in most instances we share ancestry and language. Now some people want to make this issue a race issue. It isn’t, it is a cultural issue. Culturally most Hispanic illegals do not want to become Americans, they do not want to assimilate. They want us to make concessions for them!
Now why do people generally think of Hispanics when illegal immigration is discussed? It is because most of the illegals in this country are Hispanic. They are not European, Canadian or Asian. Here are some interesting facts:
According to a Pew Hispanic Center report, Mexicans make up 57 percent of the undocumented immigrants. Another 24 percent are from other Latin American countries. Approximately 9 percent are from Asia, 6 percent from Europe and Canada, with the remaining 4 percent from the rest of the world.
According to Bear Stearn report in 2005 there are at least 20 million illegals in this country. That includes the 50,000 plus Irish illegals that should be deported.
Illegals cost US tax payers more then the Iraq War. I won’t post all the relevant info, but you can Google it.
And please Judy don’t repeat that tired argument of jobs Americans won’t do. Americans have and do every job imaginable. Turn on the boob tube and watch Dirty Jobs. It is just that Americans won’t live 3 families to a single house to make their employer richer. They won’t work for slave wages. And by the way, no one at the top of the anti illegal immigration movement has ever suggested rounding up illegal aliens. That is a straw man argument. Even though that option would work, President Eisenhower did it in the 50s. Most including me support a policy of attrition thru enforcement. Enforce the current laws and most illegals will find it too difficult to stay. They will go home on their own.