Invasion of the Invaded: NAFTA and the Rise of Illegal Immigration

“It is young, fit males who are most apt to make a successful entry…This shift in the type of worker gaining entry into the U.S. amounts to a strengthening of the labor pool available to U.S. employers while at the same time restricting access to those who in the past have been the likeliest to draw upon the states social relief programs.”44

Still, analyzing border security and its strengths and weaknesses is not the same as analyzing immigration. To ask how undocumented workers get into the country is not the same as asking why they want to get into the country. Crossing the border, especially in rural areas, is oftentimes a dangerous endeavor. In 2004 the Border Patrol reported that 464 undocumented workers died in the harsh deserts of southern Arizona and New Mexico.45 So why do so many undocumented workers attempt to enter the U.S.? It’s a simple matter of economics: Mexican workers need jobs, U.S. businesses need cheap labor. NAFTA, and the neo-liberal economic policies it represents, has only increased the motivation for Mexican workers to move north by making life harder for the most impoverished Mexicans.

Mexican immigration to the U.S. exploded in the mid-eighties, well before NAFTA. “Between 1965 and 1985, the pace of Mexican undocumented migration on the U.S.-Mexico border grew steadily albeit slowly,” writes Tony Payan, who goes onto declare 1986 “the breaking point.”46 The mid-eighties, when immigration patterns broke the steady rise model from the 1960’s and 70’s was also the time when income disparities in Mexico grew. Carbacho and Schwartz observed “following several decades in which [Mexico] moved toward a more even distribution of income, Mexico’s income disparities have generally widened since the 1980’s.”47 The 1980’s was the time of Mexico’s economic liberalization, and as was noted earlier, during the De la Madrid Presidency (1982-88) real wages fell 41.5 percent. The relationship between the economic liberalization of Mexico, the fall in wages, and the rise in immigration is, I believe, a causal one. NAFTA represents the final step the economic liberalization of Mexico, and it is during the NAFTA years that immigration has risen the sharpest. “One report noted that detentions of illegals were up 26 percent in the first quarter of 1995 compared with the same time during the previous year,” Morris and Passe-Smith declare. “In 1996 1.6 million Mexicans were deported, the largest number in seven years.”48 A review of the economic data during the NAFTA years will illustrate this point further.

Although NAFTA did grow the economy in absolute terms, as was discussed earlier, the growth did not, “trickle down” (a favorite phrase of Reagan economists) to the lower classes. Agriculture was hit hardest. In addition to the end of communal land holdings that the Zapatistas claimed was a death sentence for the campesinos of Chiapas, cheap American subsidized corn flooded Mexico under NAFTA, making it harder for rural farmers to sell their staple crop. Between 1993 and 2000 the amount of corn imported to Mexico rose eighteen fold, and rural poverty rose from 79 percent in 1993 to 82 percent in 1998.49 Even more disheartening is the fact that tariffs still exist on corn imported from the U.S. to Mexico, but will be phased out by 2008, making the situation even worse. The Salinas administration promised to launch government programs to help Mexico’s 20 million campesinos to transition from growing corn to export crops. These programs never materialized, and a Washington think tank has estimated that 1.3 million farm jobs have disappeared since 1993.50 These losses in the agriculture sector, as disheartening as they are, might be considered a cost of adjustment to a modern economy if manufacturing jobs were created as farming jobs were lost. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Employment is down more than twenty percent from its post-NAFTA peak of 1.3 million workers.51 Real wages for manufacturing jobs remain lower now then when NAFTA was implemented.52 The industry that showed major growth in terms of job creation under NAFTA was the maquiladora export industry, which assembles American export products at the border. The maquiladora industry cushioned the impact of the economic depression of the 1980’s, and under NAFTA the number of maquiladora jobs nearly doubled between 1993 and 1998, to over one million employed.53 And while maquiladora wages fell 0.7 percent from 1993 to 1998, wages in Mexico as a whole fell 1.4 percent. However, maquiladora wages still remained lower on average then Mexican manufacturing wages as a whole.54 The creation of jobs in the maquiladora industry has pulled more Mexican seeking employment closer to the border, which helps explain the increase of the border population in recent years. Although, even moving to the border, jobs are hard to find. “Mexico creates over a half a million jobs a year,” Tony Payan notes. “But over 1 million of its young people enter the job market every year.”55 With such a job shortage, it is no surprise that many Mexican migrate north in search of work. However, even though the border region is growing faster then the rest of Mexico, it is not growing fast enough to employ all those seeking work. If one can not find work after moving north, then the next logical step is to move just a little further north and try and hop the border to the U.S. In the U.S. there is sure to be work, and as much as politicians and anti-immigrant groups like to decry the loss of jobs to undocumented workers, the statistics show that the U.S. economy is able to absorb somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 undocumented workers every year. A study in The Economist showed that even with the influx of undocumented workers, the U.S. market continues to have a shortage of labor, with 161 million employments in the U.S. and 156 million workers.56 A better argument against undocumented workers might not be that they are taking jobs away from American workers, but sending their dollars away from American businesses: it is currently estimated that $14 billion is sent from workers in the U.S. to their families in Mexico, compared to $2.4 billion in 1993.57

NAFTA has only served to exacerbate the conditions that push Mexican workers away from the Mexico and toward the U.S. The poor have not been helped by NAFTA, on the contrary, their plight has become worse. They have no other choice but to move north in search of economic opportunities that will allow them to feed their families. But in terms of measures like gross domestic product (GDP) and FDI NAFTA is a success for the Mexican economy. These measurements, which neo-liberal economists obsessively point at for proof of their wisdom, fail to address the biggest problem facing globalization: the widening gap between the rich and poor. While Mexico’s rich are rich than ever, the poor are slipping even further into poverty, a fact that is not reflected in overarching economic statistics.

Mexico is now the world’s number one exporter of people. The U.S. remains the world’s number one importer. As economic and military hegemony allows the U.S. to influence and dictate economic policy for its own gain it is no surprise that the people affected by these policies want to become part of the U.S. Eduardo Galeano calls this “the invasion of the invaded.”

“They come from lands where conquering colonial troops and punishing military expeditions have disembarked 1,001 times. Now this voyage in reverse isn’t made by soldiers obligated to sell themselves in Europe or North America at whatever price they get. They come from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and, since the burial of bureaucratic power from Eastern Europe as well.  “In the years of the great European and North American economic expansion, growing prosperity required more and more labor, and it didn’t matter that those hands were foreign, as long as they worked hard and charged little. In years of stagnation and or weak growth they became undesirable interlopers: they smell bad, they make a lot of noise, they take away jobs. Scapegoats of unemployment and every other misfortune, they are condemned to live with several swords hanging over their heads: the always imminent threat of deportation back to the grueling life they’ve fled and the always possible explosion of racism with its bloody warnings, its punishments: Turks set on fire, Arabs stabbed, Africans shot, Mexicans beaten. Poor immigrants do the hardest, poorest-paid work in the fields and on the streets. After work comes the danger.”58

1 Hayden, Tom. “Introduction.” The Zapatista Reader. Ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Nation Books, 2002. p. vi.
2 Mazza, Jacqueline. Don’t Disturb the Neighbors. New York: Routledge, 2001. p.65
3 Taibo, Paco Ignacio. “Zapatistas! The Phoenix Rises.” The Zapatista Reader. Ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Nation Books, 2002. p.105.
4 “First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle” The Zapatista Reader. Ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Nation Books, 2002. p.15.
5 Taibo, p.108
6 Kopkind
7 Hayden, xxvi
8 Kopkind
9 All the above statistics were taken from The Bear and the Porcupine by Jeffrey Davidow. P. 111
10 Langley, Lester. Mexico and the United States: The Fragile Relationship. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. p.78.
11 Mazza, Jacqueline. Don’t Disturb the Neighbors. New York: Routledge, 2001.p.61
12 Dominguez, Fernandez de Castro, 62.
13 Langley, Lester. Mexico and the United States: The Fragile Relationship. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. p.88.
14 Mazza, p.17
15 Dominguez, Fernandez de Castro, 62.
16 Dominguez, Fernandez de Castro, 62.
17Covarrubias, Ann. “Mexico: The Challenges of a Latin American Power in the U.S. Backyard.” Latin American and Caribbean Foreign Policy. Ed. Frank O. Mora and Jeanne a.k. Hey. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.16.
18 Bilateral Commission on the Future of United States-Mexican Relations. The Challenge of Interdependence: Mexico and the United States. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989.p. 63.
19 Dominguez, Fernandez de Castro, 62
20 Mazza, 68.
21 Mazza 70.
22 Mazza, p.101.
23 Castaneda, Jorge. The Mexican Shock. New York: The New Press, 1995.p. 47
24 Mazza, 83.
25 Mazza, 84
26 Dominguez and Fernandez de Castro, 56
27 Cavanagh and Anderson. p,2
28 Castaneda, 46.
29 Manuel Roig-Franzia. “Behind the Debate: Propelled to Protest, Driven to Migrate.” Washington Post, April 17, 2006.
30 Smith, Geri and Cristina Lindblad. “Mexico: Was NAFTA worth it?” Business Week. 22 December 2003. p.66-72. p. 258.
31 Castaneda, p. 55.
32 Morris, Stephen D and John Passe-Smith. “What a Difference a Crisis Makes: NAFTA, Mexico, and the United States.” Latin American Perspectives 28. (Spring 2001): p.124-139. p.127.
33 Dominguez and Fernandez de Castro, 68
34 Dominguez and Fernandez de Castro, 68
35 Castaneda, 56.
36 Mazza 125.
37 Smith, 264
38 Serra and Espinosa, 60.
39 Smith, Geri and Lindblad, Cristina
40 Payan, Tony. The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars. Westport, Conn: Praegar Security International, 2006. p.71.
41 Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper. New York: Routledge, 2002.p.196.
42 Nevins, p.92.
43 Nevins, 124.
44 Nevins, 137.
45 Payan, 54.
46 Payan, 52.
47 Cavanagh and Anderson, 62.
48 Morris and Passe-Smith, 128.
49 Cavanagh and Anderson, 58.
50 Smith and Lindblad, 70.
51 Smith and Lindblad, 70.
52 Cavanagh and Anderson, 58.
53 Dominguez and De Castro, p.139.
54 Cavanagh and Anderson, p.58.
55 Payan, p.61.
56 Payan, p.61-62
57 Smith and Lindblad, p.75.
58 Nevins, p.185.