The Economics of Immigration Reform

Scapegoating Immigrants

How convenient for Goldman Sachs. Just as most working people were demanding that the Goldman bosses and other Wall Street criminals either be massively fined, jailed or worse, the nation's attention is suddenly forced to react to the racist immigration law in Arizona. And although the two incidents are not directly related, they represent a trend that is likely to increase in the months and years ahead.

Because of the economic crisis, massive unemployment, corporate bailouts, home foreclosures, and criminal activity of Wall Street, the majority of people in the U.S. have never been as passionately anti-corporation. But the corporate owned media plus the wealthy, elite-controlled Congress reacted quickly to these intolerable circumstances and fought back.

They took the fight over public opinion to the airwaves, and massively pushed the blame for the dismal state of the U.S. economy onto those unable to defend themselves — immigrants.

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How Immigration Crackdowns Backfire

The trouble with A immigran’s draconian new law

Arizona legislators are fed up with being terrorized by illegal immigrants, and they have passed a law to get tough. Under the measure, passed this week and sent to the governor, police would have to stop and question anyone they suspect of being in this country without legal authorization.

The bill passed after the fatal shooting of Robert Krentz, a 58-year-old rancher whose killer apparently entered illegally from Mexico. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu says police are also under siege: "We've had numerous officers that have been killed by illegal immigrants in Arizona."

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Arizona’s Immigration Law Is Nothing New for Border Residents

What lots of Americans don’t realize is that the new Arizona immigration law simply extends to the entire state the requirement that darker-skinned, poorer-looking Americans along the border have had to live with for decades — carrying their papers, just like people in totalitarian countries have to do.

For decades, any darker-skinned, poorer-looking person who travels entirely within the United States but along the U.S.-Mexican border has had to carry his papers with him. There is the possibility that he could be stopped by a U.S. immigration checkpoint as he travels from east to west or vice versa.

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Coca Leaves, Chicha and Beer Globalization in Latin America

On a pleasant autumn day in 1890 the Cuauhtémoc brewery was founded in Monterrey, Mexico. This brewery, which also specialized in ice production, went on to become Mexican Economic Development Inc. (FEMSA), brewing such beers as Dos Equis, Tecate and Sol. Recently the Dutch brewing giant Heineken bought FEMSA, bringing over half of the world’s beer production into the hands of just four mega-corporations. One Mexican columnist wrote of the merger in La Jornada, “Just a bit more globalization and we will all be lost.”

The concentration of beer production into the hands of a few brewers is reflective of what is happening in economies across the globe. Homogenization of culture and the centralization of wealth and power naturally follow corporate globalization. Though the recent merger in Mexico is emblematic of this profit-driven trend, homegrown examples of grassroots alternatives have emerged in the kitchens and coca fields of Colombia and Bolivia.

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Disastrous Effects of NAFTA 16 years later

On January 1, 2010 Americans mourned the sixteenth anniversary of the implementation of the deleterious “free trade” agreement that is the North American Free Trade Agreement, now it is just as important to look back and examine what an utter disaster it has been for the United States.

Proponents of NAFTA asserted that the agreement would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in America, Canada and Mexico. They promised to turn a small trade surplus with Mexico into a huge surplus that would benefit all three countries involved. Illegal immigration would be a thing of the past as jobs in Mexico would be plentiful and lucrative. Free traders talked openly of cheaper goods for American consumers with newfound purchasing power and unprecedented surges in exports to markets never before opened to U.S. products. Of course, none of that panned out and those free trade advocates failed to mention what the biggest U.S. export would be: good-paying American jobs.

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Saving Mexico

To weaken the cartels, some argue the U.S. should legalize marijuana, let cocaine pass through the Caribbean and take the profit motive out of the drug trade

n the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” the supply and use of drugs has not changed in any fundamental way. The only difference: a taxpayer bill of more than $1 trillion.

A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping fight the government’s war on drugs summed up recently what he’s learned from his long career: “This war is not winnable.”

Just last week, Mexican Navy Special Forces swarmed a luxury apartment tower in a central city and gunned down Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a drug trafficker whose organization helped smuggle several billion dollars worth of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. during the past decade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Within days of Mr. Beltrán Leyva’s death, Mexican officials were already trying to guess which of his lieutenants would take his place. Almost no one expected the death of Mr. Beltrán Leyva to slow down the business of drug trafficking or the horrific drug-related violence in Mexico that has claimed around 15,000 lives in the past three years. On Monday, hit men gunned down several family members of a Mexican naval officer who had been killed in the Beltrán Leyva raid. Four people have been arrested in connection with the killing, though Mexican authorities say the hit men are still at large.

Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials say—at least privately—that the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels.

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Hell is the Tijuana Assembly Line

Inside the Maquiladoras

“Crisis? What crisis? You’re sure there’s a new crisis? Here in Tijuana we’re always in crisis”, says Jaime Cotta with a smile. In spite of all the misery that trudges through his office, Cotta manages to retain his sense of humor. Without a doubt, he’s the person who best knows what conditions are really like in the maquiladoras, the assembly-line factories built in Mexico since the 1960s along the 3,000km frontier with the United States.

They came to Mexico because of cheap labor, almost non-existent taxes and very lax authorities, all alongside the world’s leading economy. Successive governors of the state of Baja California have been able to repeat over the years that, thanks to the maquiladoras, they enjoy full employment.

Cotta started out as a worker, then became a researcher. Now he’s a lawyer. His Information Centre for Working Women and Men (Cittac) is the only organization to support those thrown out of the factories over the past 20 years. Sacked workers, people who’ve had work accidents, temporary workers without rights or contracts, all bring stories of flagrant abuse. He advises them and sometimes suggests taking legal action. So it’s here that you come to take the social temperature of this frontier town with 1.5 million inhabitants.

Today, three workers are waiting to see him. One was suspended for two days because of one badly made component out of the 700 she produced in her 10-hour shift. “They want to sack me. They’re always watching me and they make up anything that suits them”, she says with lowered eyes. The piece of paper she hands Cotta claims that she “intentionally brought harm to the business”. She adds that in this maquiladora “technical shutdowns” happen each week. That means one day without pay, further reducing an already pathetic wage (755 pesos a week, barely $58).

“Technical shutdowns” are one of the latest brainwaves of the factory bosses. Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, has promoted them to prevent massive redundancies. The federal government pays one third of salaries, the maquiladora another third, and the employee loses the final third through days not worked. In return, factories undertake only to sack the number of employees proportional to – not higher than – the fall in production or in sales. But as Magnolia Pineda, president of the Tijuana Association of Maquiladora Industry (3), explained, “few businesses have agreed to accept this program because it’s impossible for them not to have the right to sack workers. It’s an unacceptable restriction”. So they carry out “technical shutdowns” but without paying the wage, quite illegally. In any case, she added, “employees fully understand the situation. There has never been a strike”.

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The Perils of Plan Mexico

Going Beyond Security to Strengthen US-Mexico Relations

I have been a political analyst and writer in Mexico for the past two decades. I’m also a mother faced with the challenge of raising children there. As a human rights advocate and a mother, today I speak to you, frankly, with a great sense of urgency.

Mexico is the United States’ closest Latin American neighbor and yet most U.S. citizens receive little reliable information about what is happening within the country. Instead, Mexico and Mexicans are often demonized in the U.S. press. The single biggest reason for this is the way that the entire binational relationship has been recast in terms of security over the past few years.

From a neighbor and a trade partner, Mexico has been portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security. Immigrants are no longer immigrants, but criminals, “removable aliens,” and even potential terrorists. Latinos, mostly Mexicans, are now the largest group of victims of hate crimes in the United States.

Although Mexico-bashing has been a favorite sport of the right for years, this terrible conversion of Mexico, from an ally to a “failed state” and narco-haven in the media and policy circles, began in earnest under the Bush administration and has only intensified since then. The Merida Initiative and the militarization of Mexico are the direct outgrowth of the national security framework imposed on bilateral relations.

There is a misconception that the Merida Initiative, named after a meeting between Presidents Calderon and Bush in the city of Merida, originated when Calderon requested assistance in the drug war from the U.S. government. The U.S. government, this story goes, agreed to comply. When the U.S. government cited its share of responsibility in the transnational drug trade as the world’s largest market, pundits heralded the admission as unprecedented and a new step in binational cooperation.

This is largely myth. In fact, Plan Mexico—as it was first called—has its roots in the Security and Prosperity Partnership that grew out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When the regional trade agreement was expanded into a security agreement, the Bush administration sought a means to extend its national security doctrine to its regional trade partners. This meant that both Canada and Mexico were to assume counter-terrorism activities (despite the absence of international terrorism threats in those nations), border security (in Mexico’s case, to control Central American migrants), and protection of strategic resources and investments. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon called it “arming NAFTA.”

The Bush announcement of the three-year Merida Initiative in October of 2007 extended U.S. military intervention in Mexico from this base. The plan is dubbed a “counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security initiative” although it’s the war on drugs that has received the most attention. Although U.S. troops cannot operate by law in Mexican territory, the plan significantly increases the presence of U.S. agents and intelligence services, now estimated at 1,400, and of U.S. private security companies throughout Mexico.

The terms of the Merida Initiative sends the full $1.3 billion appropriated so far to U.S. defense, security, information technology and other private-sector firms, and the U.S. government. One hundred percent of the money stays in the United States since the plan prohibits cash payments to Mexico.

In other words, what it does is ensure an expanding market for defense and security contracts, in an undeclared war that has no exit strategy in sight.

Does this sound familiar?

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