Free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, intended to stop the flow of migrants actually produce it said David Bacon, a writer and photojournalist for Pacific News Service.
Bacon addressed his concerns about globalization and how it produces migration and criminalizes immigrants during the annual Center for Mexican American Studies conference at the UH Hilton on Thursday.
"After NAFTA, General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford and Chrysler’s Mexican assembly plants no longer had to buy parts from Mexican factories. Instead, they mostly bought them from their own subsidiaries and, as a result of that, thousands of Mexicans lost their jobs when the parts plants closed," Bacon said. "In NAFTA’s first year, about a million Mexicans lost jobs by the government’s own count."
Along with NAFTA, other policies contributed to the migration of people from Mexico to the U.S., Bacon said.
"Another kind of economic reform that predated NAFTA was the ending of land reform in the changes of Article 27 in the (U.S.) Constitution, which has led to a sloping concentration of land ownership," Bacon said.
The changes also created wage discrepancies, he said.
"All of these policies produced displaced people who could no longer make a living and survive as they had done before," Bacon said. "In fact, displacement is really the most important product of these policies wherever there is a Mexican working. You know, this is not just Mexico; this is happening all over the world."
He said that on a recent visit to California, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said both the American and Mexican economies are complimentary, and such a phenomenon is impossible to stop. The American economy is a capital intensive one while the Mexican economy is rich in labor, he said quoting Calderon.
"The Mexican economy is suffering from this displacement; in a sense displacing its own citizens and can’t produce enough employment for them. So to employers, as President Calderon is speaking for them here, migration is a labor supply really," Bacon said. "Trade and migration policy are really part of the system that on one hand produces displaced labor and on the other hand puts it to use. The same system that produces migration needs and uses that labor."
Bacon said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) presented the HR 4437 Immigration Act to Congress in 2005. The bill would have made all undocumented people in the U.S. federal felons, criminalized individuals who helped them and built a 700-mile wall along the border.
Sensenbrenner’s grandfather started the Kimberly Clark Corporation, one of the world’s biggest paper companies, Bacon said. The Mexican subsidiary of the corporation is a close associate with Grupo M’eacute;xico, a Mexican mining company. In 1998, Grupo M’eacute;xico provoked a strike to cut labor costs and as a result, 800 people lost their jobs. Grupo M’eacute;xico went on to lay off an additional 1,500 employees because they went on strike, Bacon said.
Eventually, the displaced families who could not find work elsewhere migrated across the border.
"Twenty-four million (migrants) live in the United States here with documents and about twelve million without them," Bacon said. "If everybody did go home, whole industries would collapse. Some of the country’s largest corporations would go bankrupt, including the Sensenbrenner family business, because every year Kimberly Clark turns huge quantities of paper pulp into toilet paper and then sells it to us at Safe Way, and the trees that are used to make that pulp are planted and tended in forests throughout the Southeast and Northeast by thousands of immigrant workers."
For legal migrants living and working in the United States, the fear of being deported still exists, sociology professor Nestor Rodriguez said.
"Deportations are not just about immigrants hiding because they did something bad," he said. "It’s about people in general and U.S. people who marry foreign-born people as well."
Since 1996, the deportation of immigrants has increased significantly with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, he said.
"Prior to 1995, deportations were fewer than 50,000 a year," Rodriguez said.
After 1996, those numbers rose to 186,222 in 2000 and 221,000 in 2006, he said.
The private sector is the one who profits the most from deporting immigrants; money can be made throughout the entire deportation process, especially in detention centers such as the one in Raymondville, Texas, he said.
"The county built it, they paid for it and then they hired this organization from Utah that runs Job Corp. Now they’re running detention centers. This is a big industry. The GEO Group, Inc., originally from the Netherlands, is an internationally global corporation that does detention industry and they’re running some of the centers here in Australia, South Africa, etc. so it’s a global thing as well."
The ‘iexcl;Mexico Hoy! conference will continue at 8:30 a.m. today at the University Hilton in the Shamrock room. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.class.uh.edu/cmas.
