GLOBALIZATION AND NAFTA CAUSED MIGRATION FROM MEXICO
By David Bacon
The Public Eye/Political Research Associates - October
11, 2014
When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters
promised it would bring "first world" status for the Mexican
people. Instead, it prompted a great
migration north.
Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the
Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan
Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000
indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone.1
In Oaxaca, some towns have become depopulated, or are now
made up of only communities of the very old and very young, where most
working-age people have left to work in the north. Economic crises provoked by
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other economic reforms are
now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country's most remote areas,
where people still speak languages (such as Mixteco, Zapoteco and Triqui) that
were old when Columbus arrived from Spain.2 "There are no jobs, and NAFTA
forced the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a
crop anymore," Dominguez says. "We come to the U.S. to work because
we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative."
According to Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm
Worker Study, "the total population of California's indigenous Mexican
farm workers is about 120,000 ... a total of 165,000 indigenous farm workers
and family members in California."3 Counting the many indigenous people
living and working in urban areas, the total is considerably higher. Indigenous
people made up 7% of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before the
passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006-8, they made up
29%-four times more.4
California has a farm labor force of about 700,000
workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up
a majority. They are the workforce that has been produced by NAFTA and the
changes in the global economy driven by free-market policies. Further,
"the U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an
ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working
conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market," Mines says. The
rock-bottom wages paid to this most recent wave of migrants-Oaxaca's indigenous
people-set the wage floor for all the other workers in California farm labor,
keeping the labor cost of California growers low, and their profits high.
LINKING TRADE AND IMMIGRATION
U.S. trade and immigration policy are linked. They are
part of a single system, not separate and independent policies. Since NAFTA's
passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new trade
agreements-with Peru, Jordan, Chile, and the Central American Free Trade
Agreement. At the same time, Congress has debated immigration policy as though
those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people
migrating to the U.S., looking for work. Meanwhile, heightened anti-immigrant
hysteria has increasingly demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny
them jobs, rights, or any equality with people living in the communities around
them.
To resolve any of these dilemmas, from adopting rational
and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility towards
migrants, the starting point must be an examination of the way U.S. policies
have produced migration-and criminalized migrants.
Trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally
joined together by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986.
Immigrants' rights activists campaigned against the law because it contained
employer sanctions, prohibiting employers for the first time on a federal level
from hiring undocumented workers and effectively criminalizing work for the
undocumented. IRCA's liberal defenders argued its amnesty provision justified
sanctions and militarizing the border,5 as well as new guest worker programs.
The bill eventually did enable more than 4 million people living in the U.S.
without immigration documents to gain permanent residence. Underscoring the
broad bipartisan consensus supporting it, the bill was signed into law by
Ronald Reagan.
We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price
for our product at home. There's no alternative. - Rufino Dominguez, Director
of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants
Few noted one other provision of the law. IRCA set up a
Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic
Development to study the causes of immigration to the United States. The
commission held hearings after the U.S. and Canada signed a bilateral free
trade agreement, and made a report to President George H.W. Bush and Congress
in 1990. It found that the main motivation for coming to the U.S. was poverty.
To slow or halt the flow of migrants, it recommended that "U.S. economic
policy should promote a system of open trade ... the development of a
U.S.-Mexico free trade area and its incorporation with Canada." But, it
warned, "It takes many years-even generations-for sustained growth to
achieve the desired effect."
The negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months.
As Congress debated the treaty, then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari toured the United States, telling audiences unhappy at high levels of
immigration that passing NAFTA would reduce it by providing employment for
Mexicans in Mexico. Back home, he made the same argument. NAFTA, he claimed,
would set Mexico on a course to become a first-world nation.6 "We did become part of the first
world," says Juan Manuel Sandoval of Mexico's National Institute of
Anthropology and History. "The back yard."7
INCREASING PRESSURE
NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising incomes and
employment in Mexico, and did not decrease the flow of migrants. Instead, it
became a source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate. The treaty forced corn
grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico's own market
with corn from huge U.S. producers, who had been subsidized by the U.S.
Agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from
$4.6 to $9.8 billion annually. Corn imports rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000
tons from 1992 to 2008. Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year
NAFTA took effect. By 2010, pork imports, almost all from the U.S., had grown
over 25 times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican
producers dropped 56%.8
According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the
Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, "We lost 4,000 pig farms. Each
100 animals produce 5 jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports.
Counting the 5 indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000
jobs in total. This produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities-a big
problem for our country."9 Once Mexican meat and corn producers were
driven from the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to
price changes dictated by U.S. agribusiness or U.S. policy. "When the U.S.
modified its corn policy to encourage ethanol production," he charges,
"corn prices jumped 100% in one year."10
NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which
hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or
other farm products for what it cost to produce them. Mexico couldn't protect its
own agriculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut
in the 1990s plunged prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped
government might have bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat,
or provided subsidies for other crops.
But once free-market structures were in place prohibiting
government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Campesinos
from Veracruz, as well as Oaxaca and other major corn-producing states, joined
the stream of workers headed north.11 There, they became an important part of
the workforce in U.S. slaughterhouses and other industries.
U.S. companies were allowed to own land and factories,
eventually anywhere in Mexico. U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the
Larrea family, one of Mexico's wealthiest, became the owner of the country's
main north-south rail line and immediately discontinued virtually all passenger
service.12 Mexican rail employment dropped from more than 90,000 to 36,000.
Railroad workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their jobs, but they
lost and their union became a shadow of its former self.
According to Garrett Brown, head of the Maquiladora
Health and Safety Network, the average Mexican wage was 23% of the U.S.
manufacturing wage in 1975. By 2002, it was less than an eighth. Brown says
that after NAFTA, real Mexican wages dropped by 22%, while worker productivity
increased 45%.13
ATTRACTING INVESTORS, REPELLING WORKERS
Low wages are the magnet used to attract U.S. and other
foreign investors. In mid-June, 2006, Ford Corporation, already one of Mexico's
largest employers, announced it would invest $9 billion more in building new
factories.14 Meanwhile, Ford closed 14 U.S. plants, eliminating the jobs of
tens of thousands of U.S. workers. Both moves were part of the company's
strategic plan to cut labor costs and move production. When General Motors was
bailed out by the U.S. government in 2008, it closed a dozen U.S. plants, while
its plans for building new plants in Mexico went forward without hindrance.15
These policies displaced people, who could no longer make a living as they'd
done before. The rosy predictions of NAFTA's boosters that it would raise
income and slow migration proved false. The World Bank, in a 2005 study made for
the Mexican government, found that the extreme rural poverty rate of around 37%
in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped to about 52% in 1996-8, after NAFTA took
effect. This could be explained, the report said, "mainly by the 1995
economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages,
and falling real agricultural prices."16
By 2010, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty,
according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology-half the country's
population.17 The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5
million Mexican-born people lived in the U.S. A decade later, that population
more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million.
Approximately 9.4% of all Mexicans now live in the U.S., based on numbers from
Pew Hispanic. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; but another
7 million couldn't, and came nevertheless.18
From 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive economic
reforms produced migrants. The displacement had already grown so large by 1986
that the commission established by IRCA was charged with recommending measures
to halt or slow it. Its report urged that "migrant-sending countries
should encourage technological modernization by strengthening and assuring
intellectual property protection and by removing existing impediments to
investment" and recommended that "the United States should condition
bilateral aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps toward
structural adjustment." The IRCA commission report acknowledged the
potential for harm, noting (in the mildest, most ineffectual language possible)
that "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human
suffering."19
In 1994, however, the year the North American Free Trade
Agreement took effect, U.S. speculators began selling off Mexican government
bonds. According to Jeff Faux, founding director the Economic Policy Institute,
a Washington, DC-based progressive think tank, "NAFTA had created a
speculative bubble for Mexican assets that then collapsed when the speculators
cashed in."20 In NAFTA's first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their
jobs when the peso was devalued. To avert a flood of capital to the north,
then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to
Mexico, which was paid to bondholders, mostly U.S. banks. In return, U.S. and
British banks gained control of the country's financial system. Mexico had to
pledge its oil revenue to pay off foreign debt, making the country's primary
source of income unavailable for the needs of its people.
As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquiladora
industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S. market, tens of thousands of
Mexican workers lost jobs when the market shrank during U.S. recessions in 2001
and 2008. "It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that
drive people to work for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just
to earn enough to keep their family at home together," says Harvard
historian John Womack.21
IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANTS, OR DISPLACED PEOPLE?
In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz' uprooted coffee
pickers or unemployed workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because
that debate doesn't recognize their existence before they leave Mexico. It is
more accurate to call them migrants, and the process migration, since that
takes into account both people's communities of origin and those where they
travel to find work.
But displacement is an unmentionable word in the
Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress in the quarter
century since IRCA was passed has tried to come to grips with the policies that
uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters, and farmers. In fact, while debating
bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs,
four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which has caused more
displacement and more migration.
1. Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen, "Turning the
Tide?" in Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st
Century, eds. Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen (New York: New Press, 2006), 23.
?2. John P. Schmal, "Oaxaca: Land of
Diversity," ¡LatinoLA!, Jan. 28, 2007,
http://www.latinola.com/story.php?story=3908.?
3. Richard Mines, Sandra Nichols, and David Runsten,
"California's Indigenous Farmworkers: Final Report of the Indigenous
Farmworker Study (IFS) To the California Endowment," Jan. 2010,
http://www.indigenousfarmworkers.org/IFS%20Full%20Report%20_Jan2010.pdf.?
4. Mines, Nichols, and Runsten, "California
Indigenous Farmworkers Final Report of the Indigenous Farmworker Study (IFS) To
the California Endowment."?
5. Brad Plummer, "Congress Tried to Fix Immigration
Back in 1986. Why Did It Fail?" Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2013,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/30/in-1986-congress-tried-to-solve-immigration-why-didnt-it-work.?
6. David Clark Scott, "Salinas Plays It Cool After
Big Win on NAFTA," Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 19, 1993,
http://www.csmonitor.com/1993/1119/19014.html.?
7. Juan Manuel Sandoval, interview with David Bacon,
2006.?
8. David Bacon, The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy
Drives Mexican Migration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).
?9. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.?
10. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.
?11. David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 63.?
12. Bacon, Illegal People, 58.?
13. Bacon, Illegal People, 59.?
14. Elizabeth Malkin, "Detroit: Far South," New
York Times, Jul. 21, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/business/worldbusiness/21auto.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.?
15. Paul Roderick Gregory, "Outsourcer-In-Chief:
Obama Of General Motors," Forbes, Aug. 12, 2012,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/08/12/outsourcer-in-chief-obama-of-general-motors.?
16. José María Caballero et al. for the World Bank,
Mexico: Income Generation and Social Protection for the Poor, Volume IV: A
Study of Rural Poverty in Mexico, Aug. 2005, (accessed via
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/8286), 9-11.?
17. Richard Wells, "3 Ways To Compete Sustainably:
Lessons from Mexico," GreenBiz.com, Oct. 9, 2013,
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/10/09/3-ways-compete-sustainably-lessons-mexico.?
18. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.
?19. Bacon, Illegal People, 60-61.?
20. Bacon, Illegal People, 61.?
21. Bacon, Illegal People, 64.
THE ART OF ACTIVISM
Spotlighting the efforts of artists and organizations who
are engaged in the struggle for social justice and are helping build the
movement through their work.
"En los Campos del Norte (In the Fields of the
North)" is an exhibition of photographs of farm workers in the U.S.,
almost all migrants from Mexico, taken by David Bacon (shown here). The
photgraphs are hung on the iron bars of the border wall between Mexico and the
U.S., in Playas de Tijuana on the Mexican side.
For more than 30 years, David Bacon has been writing
about and photographing people who are displaced by poverty in Mexico and
choose to cross into the United States in search of a better life. David
writes:
"For me, photography is a cooperative project. For
over a decade, I've worked with the Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations, a Mexican migrant organization, and California Rural Legal
Assistance to document this contradiction. The photographs shown on the border
wall, 'En los Campos del Norte (In the Fields of the North),' are drawn from
this long-term project. They show poverty, the lack of housing for many people,
and the systematic exploitation of immigrant labor in the fields. But through
the photographs and accompanying oral histories, migrants also analyze their
situation. They demand respect for their culture, basic rights, and greater
social equality. People in Tijuana are pretty familiar with working conditions
in California, and most people I met looking at the show had actually been
there, many as workers. The images, therefore, underline the need to change
reality, and appreciate our mutual humanity and the importance of our labor.
For three decades, I've used a method that combines photographs
with interviews and personal histories. Part of the purpose is the
"reality check"-the documentation of social reality, including
poverty, homelessness, migration, and displacement. But this documentation,
carried out over a long period of time, also presents some of the political and
economic alternatives proposed by people who are often shut out of public
debate. It examines their efforts to win the power to put some of these
alternatives into practice. I believe documentary photographers stand on the
side of social justice-we should be involved in the world and unafraid to try
to change it."
No comments:
Post a Comment