Download The Mexican/US Border

The Mexican/U.S. Border
Why do people come from Mexico and other Latin American
countries?
(In the past few years immigration has apparently decreased by as much
as 50 percent due to the economic issues in the U.S.)
Free Trade: The Final Conquest of Latin America
( by Juan Gonzalez)
At first North Americans ventured into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central
America during the19th century to buy up land - especially for railroads,
transit companies
Then … early 20th century the main methods of U.S. exploitation were to
extract raw materials
• bananas
• sugar
• coffee
• oil
• and to finance the operations of Latin American governments
By 1914 Latin America accounted for nearly half of all U.S. foreign
investment in the world
•
•
•
After WWII: Third shift
U.S. apparel, then electronic plastics and chemical companies started
closing down in the U.S. and reopening abroad.
Offshore production is at the heart of the free trade model in the United
States.
NAFTA (1994)
Free trade zones or export processing zones, sprang up south of the
U.S./Mexican border.
•
By 1992 there were more than 200 of these zones in Mexico and the
Caribbean Basin.
1
Before the 1980s, Latin Americans generally protected their domestic
industries
- through heavy government ownership
- high tariffs and import substitution.
From 1960 to 1980 Mexico enjoyed robust economic growth, with real per
capita GDP rising 99 percent. [Mark Weisbrot And Luis Sandoval Center
for Economic And Policy Research, June 2006.]
• The U.S. was a comparative laggard: its GDP per capita grew 63 percent
over that period.
Since 1980 these trends have reversed:
• From 1980 to 2000 Mexico’s per capita GDP grew by 16.7 percent, less
than a third of the 53 percent growth recorded in the U.S.
• Over the following five years (2000 to 2005) Mexico was up 4 percent,
and the U.S. by 7 percent.
•
•
•
•
Debt crisis of the 1980s
Mexico was pressured by U.S. controlled international financial
institutions to adopt neoliberal, free-trade policies.
included selling public assets
increasing exports to pay down its debt
Between 1982-1992 Mexico sold off eleven hundred of fifteen hundred
state owned companies and privatized more than 18 banks.
Instead of bringing prosperity, it deepened the chasm between rich and
poor
• New Mexican billionaires emerged
• real wages plummeted
• 200,000 Mexicans lost their jobs
Reasons for NAFTA (Juan Gonzales)
2
U.S. companies wanted to evade:
• The tariffs of other countries
• U.S. labor and environmental laws.
• The old U.S. factories largely employed men
• But these new factories recruited young women who had not been a part
•
•
•
•
•
•
of Mexico’s labor force.
Mexican men were considered harder to control so weren’t hired by U.S.
managers.
Mexico’s male unemployment problem was barely dented by the maquila
program.
Women leaving villages disrupted social organization in the villages.
Women traditionally had provided critical unpaid labor.
The men followed the women to the cities.
Once they arrived at the border towns, many men decided to cross into
the United States.
People were first uprooted from traditional ways of life, then left
unemployed and unemployable as export firms hired younger workers or
moved production to other countries.
Export-led strategies have weakened the country’s domestic economy
(Gonzales)
•
Those working in the maquilas soon found that their small wages bought
less and less each day.
•
Real wages plummeted during the past fifteen years when measured
against the U.S. dollar.
On the border
Towns experience frenetic pace of growth
• Border towns are overwhelmed with lack of roads, housing, electrical
power, schools, clean drinking water
• Urban anarchy results
Pollution from factories
For example, toxic gas clouds escaped from Dupont’s Quimica Flor plant in
the densely populated neighborhood of Matamoros.
3
•
•
•
•
•
•
80,000 tons of lead sulfate was found illegally dumped in 1992 outside
Tijuana by Los Angeles-based Alco Pacific
Human impact from such pollution
Deformities in many of the city’s children were traced to maquiladoras
More and more disabled children were born
Typically the plant that was the source of the problem closed and was
sold.
Companies claim that no proof has been established of an environmental
link
Now the industrial and accident illness rate is among the highest in the
world
The same day NAFTA took effect in 1994 Mayan peasants in Chiapas
launched their Zapatista revolt
• Rebels demanded protection against NAFTA’s expected impact on
agriculture.
•
The treaty provisions had the potential to devastate close to 2 million
Mexican peasants who produced corn, the country’s food staple, on
small individual plots
•
Peasant farmers could not compete with the surge of American corn and
wheat crops whose harvests are highly mechanized.
The farm crisis that NAFTA’s opponents warned about has come true
• In 1995 Mexico imported nearly 30 percent more basic grains than it did
the previous year.
•
The result was a wave of immigration of indigenous peasants who were
no longer able to survive by producing corn and beans
•
Food exports by agribusiness to the United States exploded
4
The question of why Mexican immigrants come:
• combines the complexity of why they have chosen to leave home for a
better life here
… with the simplicity of logic it took to undertake such a task
•
“Isn’t creating a better life for oneself and your family, in the simplest
terms, what life is about,” asks Jorge Ramos, author of The Other Face
of America.
2008: Chanting "Sin maiz, No hay pais" (Without Corn, the country doesn't exist),
Mexican farmers by the tens of thousands demonstrated in Mexico City against
NAFTA.
Who are the main beneficiaries of today’s surge in international trading?
• In Mexico the largest private traders and employers are not Mexican
firms but U.S. corporations
• If free trade leads to greater prosperity, why has economic inequality
soared and poverty deepened in virtually every Third World country that
adopted neoliberal free trade policies?
Latin America now suffers from the most uneven distribution of wealth in its
history.
5