Taboo Subject at the Core of the Immigration Debate....

[Jade Fox]

As someone who works with a lot of immigrants, I can tell you most of them would rather be back home. They're here to give their kids a better life. The deterioration of there homelands is directly related to so called "free trade".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-taboo-subject-at-the-_b_18344.html

Amid all the buzzword phrases like "border security," "guest workers," and "amnesty" being thrown around in the superheated immigration debate, one buzzword phrase has barely been mentioned: "free trade." It's not that border security and guest worker status discussions aren't important. But, as I discuss more fully in my upcoming book Hostile Takeover, America's free trade policies get almost no attention, no matter how central their role is in the major challenges facing our country. How, you ask, does "free trade" fit into immigration? It's pretty simple: had America actually had a trade policy that lifted up the economic conditions for ordinary workers both at home and in other countries, there would likely be far less demand by desperate workers for illegal entry into our country.

Thankfully, at least one major media outlet, Time Magazine, has now addressed (albeit briefly) the free trade policies at the center of the immigration issue. In its coverage today, the magazine explains exactly how free trade and immigration are connected:

"When Bush, Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meet today in Cancún to discuss the continent’s dysfunctional immigration situation, they might consider that one solution lies not so much in guest-worker programs or a 2,000-mile-long border fence, but in trade—namely, a revision of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Perhaps they should ask why NAFTA—which took effect 12 years ago amid promises to raise the fortunes of Mexico’s beleaguered workers—hasn’t done more to reduce desperate labor migration over the U.S. border. That illegal flow, about a million migrants a year, is as heavy as ever...Free trade has also failed to generate enough U.S. and other foreign investment in new industries and small- and medium-size businesses—and, as a result, hasn't created enough new Mexican jobs. Even when new jobs do appear, the nation’s unforgiving low-wage business culture—the dark shame of Mexico's political and economic leaders, which NAFTA was also supposed to reform—makes sure that they still often pay in a day what similar work would pay in an hour in the U.S. Add the recent deluge of dirt-cheap Chinese imports into North America that are taking business previously provided by Mexico, and the urgency for Mexican workers to head north only heightens."
Think of it like the concept behind the Academy Award-winning movie Traffic. The movie makes the compelling point that the way to really address the drug issue is to address not just supply through interdiction of drugs in Latin America, but consumer demand for the drugs themselves. You tamp down demand, and you go a long way towards addressing the issue.

But with immigration and trade, we've done exactly the opposite - our trade policy has actually ratcheted up the desire of millions of Mexican workers to come to our country. Ten years after NAFTA, the Washington Post reports that 19 million more Mexicans are living in poverty. Similarly, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes in today's New York Times that "Mexico's real wages are lower than they were before " and economic inequality has grown.

[G2099]

1. Seems like Mexico is long overdue for a people's revolution

[Metta]

2. The rationales for NAFTA were always lies.

All of them, just to distract we the people from greenlighting corporate greed and malice at our expense.

[newswolf56]

3. The failure of NAFTA to do what it promised is the failure of capitalism:

Capitalism is inherently the most savagely exploitative economic system known to humanity -- ultimately nothing more than the elevation of genocidal/ecocidal greed into patriarchy's ultimate virtue -- and the "unforgiving low-wage business culture" is merely one of its proofs.

As to the flagrant hypocrisy of Robert Reich's present-day protests, let us not forget it was the Clinton Administration -- with a lot of help from Washington state's Senator Patty Murray (based on her voting record nothing more than an anti-gun, pro-Choice Republican) -- that inflicted NAFTA on the workers of the world and began the outsourcing of the U.S. economy.

And Murray's colleague Maria Cantwell is no better. Based on her anti-labor votes (CAFTA, the re-imposition of indentured servitude via "bankruptcy reform" etc. ad nauseum) she too is merely another anti-gun, pro-Choice Republican:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0316-03.htm

Fortunately however in the Washington state primary we have the opportunity to elect a REAL pro-labor, bring-back-the-New-Deal Democrat:

http://votemark.org/HomePage/Default.asp

Which, by the way, is also the first step toward ameliorating the problems inflicted on the working class -- that is, all of us who are not independently wealthy -- by the political treachery expressed via NAFTA, CAFTA and all other such measures.

[xchrom]

4. we have a lot of work to do to convince

the democratic party to move away from nafta -- and maybe even cafta though that has bush all over it.

this is a hard nut to crack -- because the corporatocracy is deeply embedded in this culture.