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PEROT WAS RIGHT: IMMIGRATION GREW THANKS TO NAFTA PROGRESSIVE POPULIST - We don¹t think immigrants are the enemy. Blame those who take advantage of the immigrants. It is no accident that an estimated 11 to 12 million people have come into the US in search of a better life in the 20 years since the last immigration reform, during the Reagan administration. That migration accelerated with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Ross Perot predicted in 1993 that as manufacturing in northern Mexico expanded, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers would be drawn north. "They will quickly find that wages in the Mexican maquiladora plants cannot compete with wages anywhere in the US. Out of economic necessity, many of these mobile workers will consider illegally immigrating into the US," Perot wrote. If anything, Perot underestimated the threat. Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter noted in the [Progressive Populist] that the movement of US agribusiness into Mexico has pushed more than 2 million Mexicans off the farms and into the cities, looking for jobs. Retailers such as Wal-Mart have moved into Mexico, displacing an estimated 28,000 small- and medium-sized Mexican businesses. And Mexican factory wages actually have fallen, as multinational firms force them to compete even cheaper manufacturing costs in China and other lower-cost nations. The US economy largely absorbed those immigrants through the boom years of the 1990s. Even with the Bush recession after 2001, their presence was little noted outside service industries, building trades and meat-cutting industry, where immigrants were employed to keep down the pressure for higher wages. But this year Republicans were looking for an issue that could excite working-class whites, since it was apparent that tax cuts for the rich weren¹t doing anything for them. It looks like they decided that they could stir up the rednecks by ginning up an immigration "crisis." Never mind that Republicans in Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to expand NAFTA to Central America and the Dominican Republic. That trade bill will further increase the economic squeeze on US workers as well as their Latin American counterparts. But the threat of a brown horde of illegal aliens was thought to be an excellent distraction. . . http://www.populist.com/06.11.edit.html |
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