Oh, so that's okay then. On the other hand...
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022
Foreign Policy In Focus |
Migrants: Globalization's Junk Mail?
Laura Carlsen | February 23, 2007
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
The titles that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attaches
to its operations reveal a great deal about the logic behind current
U.S. immigration policy.
Among the most suggestively titled is the ongoing Operation "Return
to Sender," one of the largest such operations in U.S. history. The
program, supposedly designed to target "fugitive aliens," has
resulted in the indiscriminate round up of over 13,000 undocumented
migrants in cities throughout the United States.
The cynical name given to this even more cynical operation implies a
sender, a receiver -- and an object. The object, or rather objects,
are migrant workers and their families.
Operation Return to Sender is an instrumentalist policy that ignores
the humanity of migrant workers. It refuses to recognize that
migrants have hopes and dreams, that they have a legitimate need to
eat and think and act. It denies family ties and affective
relationships. It also ignores the central role that undocumented
workers play in the U.S. economy and the factors that brought them to
the country in the first place.
In short, Operation Return to Sender acts on the premise that the
millions of undocumented workers in the United States today are
little more than globalization's junk mail.
Who's the Sender?
A large proportion of the detentions in Operation Return to Sender
have been Mexicans, which is logical given that most undocumented
migrants are Mexican. According to immigration expert Raúl Delgado
Wise of the University of Zacatecas, Mexico is now the world champion
in exporting its own people, with 11 million Mexicans currently
residing in the United States. The migratory drain on Mexico's
population shows up in demographic statistics, where 800 townships
now register negative growth.
The reason for this massive out-migration is clear. Mexico is not
producing enough decent jobs for its people -- and the United States
is hiring. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and
700,000 in industry. President Felipe Calderon got off to a bad start
in his attempt to reverse this trend. Government statistics for the
first two months of his administration showed a loss of 178,370 jobs
in the formal sector. The future doesn't look any rosier. A recent
Bank of Mexico business survey projected 615,000 new jobs this year,
representing a drop of 300,000 compared to last year and far short of
the estimated one-million-plus jobs needed to absorb the number of
Mexicans who enter the labor market every year.
Growing unemployment and massive labor outflow are the results of the
lopsided way Mexico has integrated into the global economy. Raúl
Delgado Wise puts it bluntly: "The strategy that Mexico followed
through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and
indiscriminate trade liberalization detonated an explosive growth in
migration."
The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers have
been displaced since NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase in
U.S. imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United
States exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico,
according to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had
risen to $9.85 billion -- an increase of 114%. U.S. exports of corn,
Mexico's staple crop and largest source of rural employment, alone
doubled to over $2.5 billion in 2006.
This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between
salaries in the United States and Mexico, and U.S. demand for cheap
labor to compete on global markets has created the current situation.
In other words, it's the international labor market that writes the
addresses and stamps the envelopes.
The Mexican government didn't explicitly decide to send off these
human missives to the United States. Despite the central place in the
economy that remittances have gained over the years, no national
policy aimed to export able-bodied citizens abroad. In fact, NAFTA
was supposed to solve immigration problems and decrease the pressure
to seek jobs in the United States.
The Mexican economy has, however, benefited from the predicament.
Guillermo Ortiz, head of the central Bank of Mexico reported recently
that 2006 remittances rose to an all-time high of $23.54 billion --
20% over the previous year.
As the second source of foreign income after oil revenues,
remittances have been a main factor in reducing extreme poverty in
the countryside. While the World Bank, among others, cites NAFTA and
the Mexican government's poverty assistance programs for achieving
that end, a 2005 report from the Bank of Mexico gives credit where
credit's due-poor families receive more assistance from remittances
than from all gover
