Shifting the Focus of the Immigration Debate

 

Mexicans have in a sense always lived in the modern-day United States, in part because between 1836 and 1854 the U.S. seized about half of Mexico to form California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.² During the last two centuries, northward immigration has gone through multiple ebbs and flows, but the most remarkable increase has occurred only in the last few decades. Between 1970 and 2000 the number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. increased from 800,000 to almost eight million, an extraordinary spike that some critics attribute to the relaxation of immigration controls in the 1960s.³ This explanation is partially correct, but it ignores the “push” factors compelling Mexicans to leave home. As it so happens, the drastic acceleration in Mexican immigration to the U.S. also corresponds quite closely with the implementation of neoliberal economic policies during the last thirty or so years. Although the reasons why Mexicans leave their country are complex and vary widely, the Mexican economy has undergone significant changes during the last thirty years which have resulted in greater hardships for the most vulnerable sectors of the population, in particular for rural laborers. Those changes and the forces driving them thus merit some attention. Specifically, I wish to examine the connection between Western economic policy and Latin American migration, and how activists can more effectively make the case for immigration on that basis.

 

The Effects of “Free Trade” on Mexico and Other Underdeveloped Countries

 

Although foreign businesses have operated in Mexico since the nineteenth century, the movement of U.S.-based corporations to Mexico and other Latin American nations began to accelerate rapidly from the late 1960s onward. After a brief experiment with import-substitution (i.e., policies favoring domestic production) in the 1950s and 60s throughout Latin America, foreign companies soon increased their political and economic influence over countries like Mexico. The World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), U.S. Treasury, and other Western institutions promoting “free trade” exerted strong pressures on underdeveloped nations to institute “free trade”—by privatizing industries, opening their countries to foreign capital, and otherwise orienting their economies toward the export market. At the same time, they urged governments to make their countries attractive to foreign investment by eliminating labor laws and environmental regulations, granting tax cuts and subsidies to businesses, and cutting social services and governmental aid to the country’s labor force. Proponents of WB/IMF policies have often characterized this as a “hands off” approach favoring “small government.” (Many critics on the left have noted the flagrant hypocrisy of policies of “free trade” and “small-government” that pressure poor governments to cut social spending while asking for direct government assistance to rich corporations in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and other hand-outs, but such observations do not usually appear in mainstream discourse).⁴

 

In 1974 the World Bank, IMF, and the U.S. instructed the Mexican government “to freeze wages, devalue the peso, and to develop oil reserves for export.” Several years later, they gave Mexico a $1.2 billion loan “on the condition that (1) wage increases be held under 10 percent, (2) social service spending be cut in favor of increased subsidies to the business sector, and (3) employment in the public sector be held at 2 percent annually.”⁵ Such measures sought to guarantee the perpetual underdevelopment of domestic industry in Mexico, since an underdeveloped economy and a large excess in labor greatly facilitates the exploitation of cheap labor and resources, and prevents potential competition with First World corporations.

 

The same pattern and logic have been consistently applied up until now. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in place since 1994, offers a concrete example. Despite promises of increased job opportunities for Mexicans, the rate of employment actually declined 9.4 percent due mainly to the loss of jobs in small- and medium-size businesses. Despite promises of lower prices for the consumer, the retail price of the canasta básica (basic necessities) rose by 257 percent in NAFTA’s first eight years. The effects on the rural sector have been particularly devastating, due to the flood of cheap imported agricultural goods from the U.S. which have ruined many small farmers. A study conducted by the World Bank itself found that the overall poverty rate in Mexico climbed by almost 20 percent between 1994 and 2000, with rural poverty reaching 86 percent.⁶  The policies in place since the seventies may not be solely responsible for Mexico’s economic woes, but they have exacerbated them and undoubtedly led to more emigration. As mentioned, from 1970 to 2000 the number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. jumped from 800,000 to about eight million. (For more on the effects of NAFTA, see http://www.epinet.org.) 

 

As most classical liberal theorists like Adam Smith emphasized, free migration is a necessary component of the labor cycle.⁷ Laborers must be free to pick up and move to another job, or else their employers will have undue advantage over them. In contrast, “free trade” and “globalization” as discussed by proponents of NAFTA generally refer to the globalization of production, but not of labor. As multinational corporations have become increasingly mobile over the past forty years, their laborers remain highly immobile and therefore in little position to make demands of their employers. In fact, even the World Bank has strongly advocated for freer migration.⁸

 

Toward a Class-Based Perspective on Immigration

 

The loss of “American” jobs is, in fact, intimately related to immigration, but not in the way that some like to argue. The impetus behind NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements has been the desire of the U.S. business class to increase their own profits by outsourcing jobs to countries with lower costs of production; that is, dirt-cheap labor. For U.S. mega-corporations the benefits of outsourcing are multiple, because in moving production overseas employers can increase profits abroad while simultaneously undercutting the strength of the labor movement at home. By 2003 almost 900,000 U.S. workers had lost their jobs since NAFTA began. For many of the workers who have not lost their jobs to outsourcing, the threat of job loss has become increasingly pervasive. Of course, workers with a low sense of job security are far less likely to organize and make demands upon their employers. As noted above, the results for the Mexican workforce have been equally disastrous. NAFTA is one of the clearest examples of how powerful corporations can manipulate and weaken national labor forces by playing them against each other. The results are unprecedented profits for big business and a noticeable decline in the average living standards of working people in all countries involved.

 

NAFTA and other “free trade” policies between the U.S. and Latin America actually occur within the broader context of a hemisphere-wide attack on social spending. Although programs like welfare are often blamed for budget deficits, an examination of the facts easily refutes this accusation. In 2006, the U.S. government pumped $419 billion into the Pentagon while spending only $17 billion on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the primary welfare program. But such facts are of little importance to “conservative” hard-liners, who long ago discovered a highly useful strategy: they can waste 30 percent of the nation’s budget on military expenditures and subsequently blame the deficit on “excessive social spending.”⁹ This strategy has been remarkably successful as a means of reducing federal aid to the poor and working class while continuing to subsidize the defense industry with taxpayer money. As the last thirty years of Reaganism have confirmed, the military-based economy in the United States and international “free trade” policies are major reflections of domestic class warfare directed against the poor and working-class population.

 

The border vigilantes with their shotguns are understandably angry over their decline in living conditions and the increased economic uncertainty of recent years. They have been squeezed and exploited by those at the top for a long time now. But focusing that anger against immigrants only serves the interests of those who are actually to blame for economic inequality. As scholars on the left have often pointed out, “it is not Mexican labor that limits the number of jobs for domestic labor or depresses wages, but the owners of production, who profit from playing them off against each other.”¹⁰ The capitalist class in the United States has had remarkable success throughout American history in preventing the development of class consciousness among workers and immigrants, particularly in recent decades as the labor movement has declined. The benefits are significant: in the last five years corporate profits in the U.S. have risen 123 percent, while “the real median take home pay of the American worker is around $1 an hour less today than in 1982.”¹¹ But as the example of NAFTA makes clear, the business elites who drive economic policy have no similar delusions about their own class interests. Neoliberalism is a concerted method of warfare directed against working classes both inside and outside the U.S., whose corporate masters pit them against each other like dogs. The increase in Mexican immigration in recent decades is in large part a reflection of these power relationships at play on the hemispheric scale. But thanks to the successful fomentation of hatred, nationalism, and nativism in the U.S. and a willfully compliant media machine, such relationships go largely unnoticed by their principle victims while their beneficiaries draw in seven-, eight-, and nine-figure salaries¹²  

 

Although globalization is often alleged to be a force of its own, precisely howthat globalization occurs reflects the interests of certain classes, namely those with the power to influence government policies. Globalization in itself may be inevitable, but the form that globalization takes is not. The benefits that certain classes of people receive are the result of specific policies and actions designed to maintain the advantages enjoyed by the few at the expense of the many. When governments set and enforce restrictions on the mobility of laborers, such as laws limiting immigration, a small class of capitalists and investors enjoys considerable benefits since workers who are not free to move have little power to negotiate for better wages and working conditions (again, Adam Smith).  Yet the discussion of competing class interests seems to be largely absent from the mainstream debate on immigration.

 

Some Strategies for the Current Debate

 

An honest look at global economic relationships over the past half-century suggests what a detrimental effect the policies of “advanced” nations have had on the development of the Third World. In short, the First World has reaped the enormous benefits of cheap land, labor, and resources from the Third World, while at the same time impeding (and often formally restricting) economic development there. The exploitation of labor, goods, and resources from poorer and technologically-disadvantaged nations has brought benefits to us all. For example, consumers in industrialized nations who buy foreign-made products (i.e., all of us) benefit from cheaper prices. From this observation, one could reasonably conclude that we owe poor laborers in Mexico at least as much as they owe us.  To the extent we have each benefited from the exploitation of the underdeveloped world, we are all responsible for the economic desperation that compels most emigrants to leave their homes in search of work.

 

 

¹ This latter group allies itself (often unwittingly) with the capitalist class in the U.S., who benefit from having a large pool of easily-exploitable labor at their disposal. But the “pragmatic” argument that immigrants form a valuable part of the economy is dangerous for another reason, because it justifies the subordinated economic position of immigrants, and implicitly advocates the presence of immigrants “as temporary laborers, but not as residents” (Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Second Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 128). Less familiar arguments that pro-immigrant voices have made include “the decreased rates of violent crime in areas where immigration is the heaviest” and appeals to “the strikingly similar values—family, religion, hard work—that Hispanic immigrants share with the most ‘traditional’ of Middle Americans” (“The New Nativism,” The Nation, 28 Aug. 2006. Accessed 2 Sept. 2006 from http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 20060828/editors3). 

⁹ The figure of 30 percent is taken from the website of the War Resisters League [internet]; accessed 3 Oct. 2006 from http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm. This figure is not congruent with the 2006 figures given above because, first, it pertains to FY2007, and second, because it includes other allotments such as funding for veterans (which is not wasted, but is a product of excessive military expenditures in the past).

¹⁰ Acuña, Occupied America, 171.

¹¹Jack Rasmus, “Reorganizing American Labor,” Z Magazine Online 19: 7/8 (July/Aug. 2006) [internet]; accessed 20 Aug. 2006 from http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2006/rasmuspr0706.html.

¹² For a list of CEO salaries and compensation, see http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ and http://www.forbes.com/2005/04/20/05ceoland.html.

¹³ I thank Professor Alex Dupuy for pointing out this connection in several lectures in April and May of 2005.