A Better Way to End Unauthorized Immigration

By Douglas Massey, Miller-McCune.com. Posted January 8, 2009.

Poland is the largest of the new EU entrants; it is also wealthier than most of the others. So I have also looked at development indicators in Mexico and Poland in comparison with Romania, one of the poorest of the recently admitted nations.

Despite obvious social and cultural differences, these three nations line up at roughly the same level of economic development. There is certainly little evidence to suggest that the integration of Eastern European nations into the EU poses a greater challenge than the integration of Mexico into the North American market. Yet the EU continues on the successful integrative path it blazed in Greece and Spain.

And despite the glaring failures of the NAFTA model to deliver economic growth, political stability and controlled migration, the U.S. persists in its commitment to unilateral border militarization and selective economic integration. When Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2001 proposed a revamped "NAFTA-plus" that would include a development fund to support infrastructure development and poverty alleviation, he was firmly rebuffed by Bush administration officials who, Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies has reported, dryly noted that "we’re no longer in the business of Marshall Plans."

The U.S. has not only refused to reconsider the failed policy of assuming that free trade will solve social and economic problems in the Americas; it has also moved to compound its earlier errors by extending the experiment to other countries in the western hemisphere. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, finalized in 2004, was negotiated along lines similar to those of NAFTA and offered U.S. interests greater access to markets in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. But it made no concessions on labor mobility. It also offered no financial assistance to countries facing wrenching structural adjustments.

The EU’s approach to regional integration offers a proven model of success for the spread of prosperity and the beneficial management of international migration. Despite initial misgivings by some EU members, the poor four -- Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece -- were successfully integrated into the system. Ireland prospered abundantly as its per capita income rose from 63 percent to 111 percent of the EU average. Although absolute income gaps persisted for the other countries, the relative size of the income differential fell everywhere.

Institutional harmonization and rising relative incomes led to the rapid reversal of long-standing trends and the remarkable transformation of all four nations into immigrant-receiving societies. There is no practical reason why the same model cannot be applied in North America and, once NAFTA is functioning effectively, to Central and South America.

The only barrier to realizing this dream is the reluctance of American leaders and the general public to define Latin Americans as "us" rather than "them," or to see Latin and Anglo-Americans as common citizens in a cooperative American union of equal and independent states. This vision is no less achievable in the Americas than it is in Europe. Indeed, following the European model of integration offers the only realistic way out of the current quagmire of stalled economic growth, uncontrolled immigration and corrosive political bickering in North America.

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Douglas Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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