"Child Labor in Mexico Puts Food on US Tables"

The lead story in The Arizona Republic today adds another chapter to the sorry tale of NAFTA's effects on the Mexican people.

"About 300,000 youngsters. . . work illegally in Mexico's fields, the U.N. Children's Fund says, making child labor a major link in the chain that increasingly supplies American dinner tables."

Mexican law prohibits child labor.

"Nevertheless, children under 15 make up 20 percent of Mexico's migrant farmworkers, the Mexican Labor Secretariat says. Less than 10 percent of these children attend school and 42 percent suffer from some form of malnutrition, government studies show.

"They persist in the fields despite harsh criticism from international groups, rules imposed by U.S. distributors and increasingly strident warnings from the Mexican government."

Here's why:

"The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement is partly to blame for the child-labor phenomenon. . . .

"The trade pact has opened up the U.S. market to Mexican farmers, encouraging large-scale packing and exporting operations in Mexico's northern and central states. . . .

"Small-scale farmers, mostly Indians from southern Mexico, have found it hard to compete. Instead, they began migrating north each harvest season to work the big fields.

"The children of these families went from working on the family farm to working for hire.

". . . In most cases, the children do not appear on the farms' payrolls.

". . . But because adult workers earn bonuses for picket more than their daily quota, parents with 'helpers' bring home more money. Farms save money beause they do not have to pay social security for youngsters."

It goes unmentioned that US agribusiness operates large farms as well as "packing and exporting" operations both in Mexico and on this side of the border, in Texas's Rio Grande Valley, for instance, and in Arizona's onion fields. It is not unheard of for the same crews of undocumented workers to work in both operations, as was attested at this week's House Education and Labor Committee hearing on immigrant labor shortfalls. [Hearing on "Do Federal Programs Ensure U.S. Workers Are Recruited First Before Employers Hire From Abroad?" Tuesday, May 6, 2008]

Also not reported in the discussion of parents' recruiting their children as 'helpers' is the corollary that adult workers wouldn't need to impress their children if their own labor provided a living wage.

For them in Mexico, as here, it doesn't.

This puts a whole new inflection on "grow your own."

Bon appétit.

NAFTA Short and Sweet

From the Economic Policy Institute:

'Despite its name, the primary purpose of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was not to facilitate trade among separate sovereign societies. Rather, it was to promote an integrated continental economy and establish the rules to govern it.

'Public officials and economists frequently claim that trade agreements "create more high-paying jobs for American workers." Trade is supposed to move workers from low-productivity, low-wage import-competing industries into high-productivity export jobs with better wages. Yet the reverse has been true for U.S. trade with Mexico since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. In the United States workforce, NAFTA has contributed to the reduction of employment in high-wage, traded-goods industries, the growing inequality in wages, and the steadily declining demand for workers without a college education.'.

NAFTA has hit low-skill, low-educated US workers hardest. It has also hit low-skilled, low-educated Mexican workers hardest. That should give us a big, fat clue: Instead of waving their guns and hollering obscenities, US militiamen should be demanding the proof that US workers won't be facing their own long desert trek in the years to come.

All of us should be combining forces with workers across this hemisphere to demand job, wage, workplace safety, and environmental protections for everyone. Divide-and-conquer works for Monsanto, General Foods, and the Carlyle Group, but isn't going to float our boats.

The graph above, from the same source, doesn't tell all we need to know by a long shot, but it sure points us in the right direction. Again from the Economic Policy Institute:

'As a former foreign minister of Mexico once remarked, NAFTA was "an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies." It should, therefore, be no surprise that NAFTA rules protect the interests of large corporate investors while undercutting workers' rights, environmental protections, and democratic accountability. Hence, NAFTA should be seen not as a stand-alone treaty, but as part of a long-term campaign by the conservative business interests in all three countries to rip up their respective domestic social contract.''

Demands from disgruntled wingers that we on the Left aren't criticizing Mexico for this diaspora of the desperate are reasonable enough. Mexican oligarchs are just as responsible as our own oligarchs. It's not immediately clear to me, however, what leverage I have over Mexican oligarchs. That is, the reason my focus stays on the USA is because I am a citizen of the USA. What's done in my name is my business, and to the extent that I have any leverage, however minuscule, it is with my own government, not the Mexican government.

Fences don't keep out hungry people. The border fence is a smoke screen, a full-employment plan for Republican construction cronies like Halliburton. It's not going to keep anything out except wildlife that have migrated across the desert in specific patterns for millennia. It's time to stop playing "pretend" and start acting like grown-ups. Some of our big boys have made a hell of a mess for the rest of us to clean up. I suggest we focus our attention on them, in the form of extended detention in CCA and Wackenhutt, and accounts payable for the cost of restorating a functioning US economy, cleaning up the desert, and paying damages to the victims of the Republicon bait-and-switch both here and in points further south. This includes the Bushes and the Clintons. For starters. Meanwhile, no more "free trade" deals. They're many things, but "free" isn't one of them.

What Do You Know About NAFTA?

It's one of the main causes of the diaspora of Mexican and Central American people in search of a means of staying alive. Unless you understand how NAFTA and other so-called "free trade" agreements have affected both US citizens and Mexican citizens, you will be vulnerable to a lot of misinformation disseminated by interests organized specifically to make sure that you direct your anger where they want you to and not where it belongs.

Here's a brief summary of some of NAFTA's effects on US workers. Go here for more about that as well as for the facts on how NAFTA has affected Canadian and Mexican workers. You can see at a glance who benefitted and who is losing. Not surprising that those who are losing are also the main militia and minuteman and anti-immigrant constituency, is it? Unfortunately, they're shooting the wrong goose.

Growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada have displaced production that supported 1,015,291 U.S. jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994 (see Table 1-1b).

Contrary to the rhetoric of most government officials and economists, industries that compete with imports from Mexico pay 1% to 5% more than export jobs (see Table 1-4 and Appendix Table 1-A1). This result is quite robust, and is confirmed with six different methods for computing average, trade-weighted wages. [This caused a drop in wages for US workers in related jobs.]

Workers with at most a high school education were particularly hard hit by growing trade deficits—they held 52% of jobs displaced; these workers make up 43% of the workforce.

Most of the jobs displaced by NAFTA trade deficits are in the manufacturing sector, which employs a higher share of such workers than any other major industry (see Table 1-5).

NAFTA displaced into lower-paying jobs 523,305 workers with a high school degree or less.

Men, who make up 55.2% of the labor force, lost 649,048 job opportunities, or 63.9% of total jobs displaced due to NAFTA deficits.

Women, who make up 47.8% of the labor force, were especially hard hit by rising imports in apparel: they lost 34,855 job opportunities, 67% of all positions displaced in the apparel sector.

The 1 million job opportunities lost nationwide are distributed among all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with the biggest losers, in numeric terms: California (-123,995), Texas (-72,257), Michigan (-63,148), New York (-51,582), Ohio (-49,886), Illinois (-47,701), Pennsylvania (-44,173), Florida (-39,987), Indiana (-35,157), North Carolina (-34,150), and Georgia (-30,464) (see Table 1-2).

The 10 hardest-hit states, as a share of total state employment, are: Michigan (-63,148, or -1.4%), Indiana (-35,157, -1.2%), Mississippi (-11,630, -1.0%), Tennessee (-25,588, -0.9%), Ohio (-49,886, -0.9%), Rhode Island (-4,482, -0.9%), Wisconsin (-25,403, -0.9%), Arkansas (-10,321, -0.9%), North Carolina (-34,150, -0.9%), and New Hampshire (-5,502, -0.9%) (Scott 2005, Table 1-3).

NAFTA is a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United States to Canada and Mexico. Furthermore, no protections were contained in the core of the agreement to maintain labor or environmental standards. As a result, NAFTA tilted the economic playing field in favor of investors, and against workers and the environment, resulting in a hemispheric "race to the bottom" in wages and environmental quality in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Sound familiar?

Behind Immigration: The Facts

The Border, The People, The Questions: Part I

This is the first in a two-part reflection on the "border crisis."

A lack of solid information has never stopped an American from forming an unshakeable conviction, and so it is on the question, what to do about the border with Mexico.

I don’t know how the "border crisis" will end or even whether it will end. I do know that NAFTA and CAFTA are making it worse for Mexico and Central America and for us. I do know that keeping our focus exclusively on illegal immigration keeps our attention off the far greater threat of privatization, disaster capitalism, and the flagrant disinvestment of major US corporations in the future of America.

I also know that cries for a border wall and protestations of national sovereignty are too often made by people who've never been southwest of Cincinnati--often the same people who support invading Iraq and taking its oil because our need makes us entitled to it.

For me, attacking people who have the guts to walk across this killer desert to pursue hopes their leaders and ours have made unrealizable at home, is just wrong. Even the rhetoric we use distances us from our capacity for empathy and thus from the conviction to pursue a truly just and lasting solution. These aren’t “illegals.” They, like us, are dreams incarnate. For more, keep reading.

Part I

If you could visit southern Arizona with me, you would see that the line that marks the US-Mexican border is utterly arbitrary. If we went to Nogales, for instance, you would see a wall that cuts a town right in two. You would see that on one side of that wall, most of the people have brown skins and black hair, and on the other side, most of them have brown skins and black hair. Many are related. Many Mexican families have been on this side for generations, and have relatives on both sides.

There’s not a lot of difference. Except for the signs, I guess, and the houses. The first time you see them, so close, the differences are repulsive. On that side, shanties of tin expand and ping in the rising heat. They run up the hill alongside the wall next to one-room cinder-block dwellings, squat, rough-mortared, and often aslant. It’s bad. It is said that just crossing that wall will raise a person’s income 10 times over. It seems likely. On this side, modest houses sit in tidy ranks athwart the hillside, here a white clapboard Victorian, there a dusty 1950s bungalow, and over there a low, khaki Territorial, its peaked tin roof flashing in the ubiquitous sun.

On Nogales’ outskirts, the broad expanse of desert makes a tawny foil for a Jay-blue sky and distant violet mountains. The desert’s subtle palette and the glass-dry air agree to make a fool of us: It doesn’t look so tough, does it? It’s flat, after all, and there’s not much brush. But out here, they say that whatever lives in the desert is probably poisonous and either stabs, stings, or bites. Only your angle of view obscures the ragged arroyos, deadly in a flash flood. High, shard mountains that seem four or five miles away are maybe two days out, by foot—if you’re fit and have water.

If you’re new here, and if you’ve come here in the summertime, you will already have discovered why a person can easily die in this desert. Your body will have experienced this truth well before your mind has even begun to come to terms. A person in ordinary physical shape, sight-seeing as one might in DC, say, will find that a thirty-minute stroll in 108° Fahrenheit brings a vague dizziness, fatigue, rasping thirst, and a goodly dose of humility.

But you’re there, air-conditioned and watered, and this world is a million miles away. All you really know is what you’ve heard: There’s a “border crisis.”

Most Americans are as intimately familiar with our “order crisis” as with the challenge of democracy in Egypt. But lack of good information has never yet stopped any of us from offering an opinion.

So what would you say to setting up immigration checkpoints along Interstate 19, which links Nogales with Tucson and points north? Seems like a good idea to check all northbound vehicles for stowaway immigrants and coyotes, and when you find them, arrest them and send them back home, right? Bueno?

Maybe not. Here’s one first-hand, been-there point of view--from the Rev. Randy Mayer, a officer of Humane Borders, and a citizen member of a Green Valley committee considering the location of a checkpoint on the north side of I-19:

From my perspective as a community resident and faith leader who has been actively involved in border issues, I struggle with the deception and distraction the checkpoint conversation makes on real security and real border and immigration reform.

It is pretty clear that the checkpoint does very little in making our country or community more secure. It just pushes the undocumented immigration and drug-smuggling activity further to the margins, deeper into our neighborhoods and further into the shadows, while it quietly sweeps meaningful immigration reform under the carpet.

In essence, the checkpoint makes the cheap appearance that if we take the law enforcement approach, we will be safe and secure — all will be well.

The reality is that we have given the federal agencies in charge of border security, customs inspections and drug enforcement plenty of time to get a grip on the problem. In fact, over 13 years, we have given them an increasing supply of money, technology and agents to achieve "operational control." Each year, they come back saying that if only they had this or that they could get things under control.

With this strategy and mind-set, we now have 12 million undocumented migrants in this country, an endless supply of illegal drugs and over 3,000 people dead in our deserts.

I do not blame the law-enforcement folks at all. They have been asked to do the impossible, to fight a battle that they cannot win because they can only address the symptoms of the problem.

The root causes are much bigger, stronger and have a lot to do with economics, unfair free-trade agreements and the basics of human survival.

I oppose the checkpoints because I think it is a sellout to addressing the root causes. It allows the politicians and policy-makers an easy way out and leaves our community and the rest of the nation with a throbbing wound.

We need comprehensive immigration reform that includes a strong guest-worker program that allows migrants to work and encourages them to return home with their earnings to build a vibrant economy in their countries and villages of origin. [First published as an op-ed in The Arizona Daily Star, and reprinted in Desert Fountain, August 9, 2007, the newsletter of Humane Borders]

How about building a border wall? Many Americans are all for it, but I imagine that if you came here, you’d have some serious questions about its feasibility. Like me, I expect you’d think one look at the Patagonia and Huachuca Mountains and the Atacosa Highlands would nail that plan for several reasons, but fools rush in, apparently. The current plan is to put up two layers of reinforced fencing across 700 miles--five sections of the border--with electric underground sensors, lights and cameras.

By my count, that makes 1,400 miles of fence to defend a fraction of the 1952-mile US/Mexico border. I don’t see how that’s going to work. For the $2.2 billion estimated cost (which will double or triple), this wall will only raise the prices the coyotes (human smugglers) charge their victims, and, like checkpoints, drive the immigrants still further into the wilderness. More death, more danger, more venal abuse, more corruption.

And then there are the objections of environmentalists, and the opposition of the Native Americans, some of whose land these fences would traverse, and the reaction of the Mexicans themselves. Animals don’t recognize borders, and “reservations” are sovereign nations, and fences create bitter resentment that only supercharges folks determined to get past them.

All but the Minuteman types point out the obvious: People adapt. Desperate people adapt quickly. Fences can be climbed, flown over, blown up, caved in, and dug under. Even Republicans admit that 50% of those who try succeed in climbing over the wall in San Diego. The nightly news has documented sophisticated tunnels used by coyotes and drug smugglers. There are always work-arounds.

Fence the southwestern United States? I call it a scam. It’s a crony works project meant to reward Republican loyalists and hoodwink the rest of us into thinking something’s actually being done. You can’t stop a whirlwind with a sledge hammer, and you can’t fix an economic problem with a paramilitary response. It’s the wrong tool. You’d think Iraq would have taught us something about that.

Added September 15, 2007: Washington Post article
Texas Observer article

See Part II for more.