June 14, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TRADE POLICY AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Conventional wisdom is that globalization is here to stay. I haven't heard much discussion from the current crop of presidential candidates about the destructive effects of United States trade policy. I think NAFTA and GATT should be repealed. Globalization has been harmful to workers in the United States and has wrecked havoc on people in Central and South America. One of the things that fuels illegal immigration to the United States is the desperation of people in Mexico and Central America because their economies are being destroyed by globalization. The political and corporate class in the United States want it both ways. They love the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants, but they gripe about the social costs of dealing with the immigrants. They love globalization, but they don't want to deal with the destructive effects of globalization. This article by David Bacon is at www.truthout.org:

The comprehensive immigration bill may have stalled in the Senate last week, but the debate over immigration policy will undoubtedly continue - especially over the status of the millions of undocumented workers presently in the United States, as well as those who will come in the next few years.

In fact, that continued flow of workers is inevitable, since Congress is also considering new trade legislation that is guaranteed to increase the number of undocumented workers in the United States. Our nation's trade and immigration policies have never been as closely connected as they are today. Four new agreements are currently being considered, while President Bush is pushing for "fast track" authority to negotiate even more of them. All will exacerbate our current immigration issues by displacing thousands of workers and farmers, most of whom will join the cross-border flow of migrant labor that already tops 200 million people worldwide.

Over the last two years, all of the immigration proposals considered by Congress have sought more openly than ever to channel that labor, making it available to the world's largest corporations at a price they want to pay. Welcome to the new world order.

US employers have always wanted the country's immigration policy to supply workers when needed and get rid of them when the need ended. At its logical extreme, this policy produced brutal results. In the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported in neighborhood sweeps around the country, when unemployment rose and threatened social unrest. Less than a decade later, the US government negotiated the return of those same people as braceros, or temporary contract workers.