Connecting the Dots: NAFTA, Free Trade and the Rise of Illegal Immigration
ELVIA R. ARRIOLA, EX. DIR. Women on the Border (2009)
Why do contemporary proponents of immigration reform ignore the connections between increased migration of people looking for work from Mexico and the changes in the Mexican economy pursuant to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? To labor activists the two have obviously gone hand in hand. But it seems that few are bothered to examine how and why the rise and fall of American multinational corporate investments under NAFTA have also contributed to the economic mess our country is in today.
As the new Obama administration struggles to handle the economic chaos, rising unemployment and other forms of financial chaos and instability produced by excessive worship to the gods of “free market” and “deregulation”, I can’t help but wonder how the losses of homes and jobs in the U.S. are being mirrored in the lives of workers in the Mexican maquiladoras who had it hard even before the late 2008 downturn. Their lives had already been dictated by the conditions set in most export processing zones — cheap labor for cheap wages which means bad housing, terrible workspaces, chronic health problems associated with lack of safety and toxicity in the workplace. The deregulatory spirit that led as much to backbreaking mortgage payments, job losses, smaller paychecks and higher health costs has equally affected the Mexican worker who supposedly “stole that American job.“ But their stories are rarely heard amidst the cry for real change in the policies designed to bring the economy back into balance.
Since at least 1993, when NAFTA became law, labor and environmental activists complained that the global economy was bad for all working classes. The protest of the organized labor in the U.S. fell on deaf ears — that free trade would devastate the working classes. Today, cities like Detroit are dead zones. There are no jobs anywhere. But Detroit is only an extreme example of what has been happening in many other U.S. cities and throughout the world. Every time another company could outsource to India or Mexico or China a job that had been paid at union wages, a job has been lost. But as the documentary China Blue graphically portrays, the job lost in the U.S. has hardly been one that is paid well in a factory that takes care of its workers.
Multinational corporations ran toward Mexico under NAFTA in the mid nineties, opening up a huge number of assembly factories for products once assembled in the U.S. The American “rust belt” also changed as thousands of companies reorganized their production and assembly operations and outsourced to subsidiary factories opened up at the Mexican border.
The face of the Mexican economy began to change as more factories appeared, hired new labor that in turn forced migrations of people desperate to work from the South. The northern Mexican border had been industrialized once before in the 1960s with mostly female labor. Now it got a booster shot with tempting privileges in NAFTA for corporations to invest, export, sell and profit with reduced labor costs, exemptions for tariffs and the potential for civil monetary judgments against a host country that threatens profitable activity with regulations viewed as the equivalent of “expropriation.”
Other benefits ensued for the foreign investor. An American company did not worry as much in Mexico about health and safety inspections as government officials have tended to be more lax with foreign companies. The large bureaucratic unions have tended to side with management so that workers’ complaints about long hours or stress or even toxicity are virtually ignored.
Furthermore, under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, complaints from workers against American companies became the government’s problem not the employers and because of the relative weakness of NAALC, the employers are almost unaccountable for abuse or misconduct. The most a company can be pressured by is the rise of a true democratic movement among the workers, which is usually avoided by bullying pro-management unions, or classic union-busting tactics like harassment and firing of activist workers. Fired workers are then blacklisted from factory work around the city. The only way changes do take place in a maquiladora is with persistent, patient organizing by grassroots worker groups who educate the timid on their labor rights and who, using legal strategic tactics, assist them in organizing against sweatshop conditions, toxicity, abuse, harassment and workplace safety concerns.
Because NAFTA was designed for the investor and not the worker, the maquiladora industries at the border provide only jobs, not transferable skills, not careers or necessarily improvements in the general quality of living. NAFTA was pitched as a solution for illegal immigration. But arguably, NAFTA has done the opposite. NAFTA has disrupted the economic arrangements in Mexico, mainly between the Mexican government and farmers, which has devastated the Mexican farmers’ ability to compete with American commercial farming.
The result has been a setup for economic disaster among local Mexican farmers. When they cannot compete, their families face starvation. So they migrate wherever they hear of work. The women may head to the cities for domestic service. Or the whole family heads for the border following up on connections to the freedom trails, the paths taken by other family, village contacts, or friends of friends, who go as far as they need to re-locate, find work, and make money to send back home. The migrants’ target? The low wage jobs in the U.S., in restaurants, car washes, landscaping, janitorial, construction.
A simple visit to the border will open the eyes of any American who is curious to see why a Mexican citizen of the working classes might feel the pressure to leave home, to risk his life to migrate across the border because their options for survival are a miserly paid job in an assembly factory opened up by a multinational corporation-unskilled labor, terrible workplace conditions, shantytown housing, environmental hazards, etc. Is it any wonder then that the job at the border factory is at best a temporary stopping point? If a worker can make 40-70 dollars per week in a factory for a 40-60 hour work week, why not opt for crossing illegally and getting at least that amount in one or two days of work?
One thing will remain the fact of life even when the economy begins to improve under the desperately need improvement on policing of corporate conduct introduced by the legislative agenda of the Obama administration. And that is the the U.S.’s neighbor to the South is still likely to see the U.S. as a potential employer, as a regular investor in the Mexican labor economy, and as a regular purchaser of American products. True, we need some kind of reform in immigration policy, for the U.S. cannot physically absorb the approximately 25 million Mexicans whom, according to the World Bank, make up the poor class and live on less than $2.00 per day in the Mexican economy.