Smart Supply-Side Immigration Control

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 12:00 AM on May 1, 2008.

Over on the front page, I argue that a more intelligent and progressive approach to immigration would focus on the largely unregulated and substandard jobs that migrant workers fill, rather than on the individuals who work them.

It's a "big-think piece," and space required me to go short on the specifics. But clearly, a smart approach to immigration control would focus on both the demand and the supply.

On the supply side, a key issue is trade -- a subject near and dear to me for a long time. We see a lot of hyperbolic discussion of immigration, but virtually no acknowledgment of the way our trade policy and larger promotion of neoliberal orthodoxy worldwide fuel human migration.

A good way to understand the relationship is by looking at the history of immigration to America, and the tensions it has caused. There is always a modest flow of immigrants coming for all variety of reasons. That steady trickle doesn't lead to much acrimony among Americans. But that modest flow is occasionally punctuated by waves of mass immigration, and that's when people get touchy about the whole thing.

While individuals have all sorts of reasons for choosing to emigrate, those peaks -- "waves" is a good word to describe them -- always come in response to a shock somewhere else in the world. Those shocks might be a civil war, a natural disaster, a famine or an economic collapse.

Our trade policy, and the larger economic ideology we promote aggressively around the world, both contribute to these kinds of economic shocks and limit other governments' responses to them.

The current wave of elevated immigration began in the 1990s, and a large share of it has come from Mexico. A number of factors are in play, but a good way to understand my point is that much of today's Mexican immigration started with corn.

NAFTA led to a flood of subsidized corn into Mexico. Employment in Mexico's agricultural sector dropped by 16 percent between 1993, the year before the NAFTA went into effect, and 2002.

Service sector employment was stable -- it didn't absorb many of those workers. And while manufacturing increased in the maquiladoras between 1994 and 2000 -- when it peaked with about 800,000 jobs -- the maquiladora zone shed 250,000 of those jobs over the next three years, most of them outsourced to China. Make capital mobile, make goods mobile and people will have no choice but to mobilize themselves to follow the jobs.

Mexico was promised millions of new jobs under NAFTA, but the promise proved false. The country had a mini baby boom in the early 1980s, and its economy hasn't been able to absorb those babies as they've come of age and entered the work force. Mexico doesn't have unemployment insurance.

And because of Mexico's commitment to the corporate globalization agenda, its government can't do much to reverse the trend -- trade deals aren't about trade so much as tying governments' hands and keeping them from "intervening" in the economy. Mexico can't stimulate its agricultural sector with price supports, protect industries that are vulnerable to cheap imports or subsidize either agriculture or manufacturing.

And it's not just NAFTA. Average wages in Mexico, adjusted for inflation, are lower today than they were in 1980. Much of Mexico's pain was due to the peso crisis in the mid-1990s ($$). That was a homemade crisis -- and the international institutions ended up bailing the country out of its hole -- but, as economist Mark Weisbrot noted, the crisis was aggravated by Mexico's slavish adherence to the "Washington consensus" -- a set of policies designed to make countries friendly to foreign investors, often at the expense of domestic well-being -- in the preceding years:

In the period prior to the peso crisis, the Mexican government pegged the peso at a level against the dollar that was widely recognized as being over-valued. There were clearly political considerations behind this decision, some of which had to do with winning the approval of NAFTA by the U.S. Congress. The impact of the currency devaluation was also accentuated by Mexico's ... increased liberalization over the prior decade, [otherwise] the impact of a currency devaluation would not have been as serious.

So in articulating a more progressive approach to immigration, why not include some measures that would explicitly link issues like NAFTA to immigration?

Translated into policy terms, that would mean including something like the NAFTA Accountability Act into immigration control measures. But why not take it a step further, and require a "migration impact assessment" -- like an environmental impact evaluation -- for all new trade agreements and also for the activities of the international financial institutions that we support?

The surge in entries starting in the mid-1990s didn't originate in Mexico City, in Mexico's southern agricultural states or in the countries to Mexico's south. It started in mahogany-paneled conference rooms in Geneva and London and, most of all, in Washington. Let's look at the root of the issue rather than tinker around its edges finding easy people to scapegoat for real problems that are largely of our own creation.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.