Thread: Free trade & immigration

http://www.americaneconomicalert.com/ne ... ID=2738494

Free trade and immigration:

cause and effect

by Jacob Hill --- Council on Hemispheric Affairs

In recent months, the US Congress has circumvented the will of President George Bush by delaying any action on free trade agreements with Peru and Panama. Moreover, the Congressional leadership has just decided to refuse to further discuss the Colombian free trade agreement at this time, damning one of President Alvaro Uribe’s most prized economic initiatives.

Now, these issues, much like the immigration debate, will most likely not be revived until after the 2008 elections, if at all. In the meantime, it is vital that all parties involved examine the inextricable link between these two failed policies --- immigration reform and expansion of free trade.

As US concern over both immigration and free trade issues were reaching a fever pitch, the reality of how the latter impacts the former has not been adequately addressed. It is likely that the group most directly affected by these issues has been the rural, agrarian population of Mexico. Since 1994, the year in which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, immigration from Mexico to the United States has more than doubled, due, in large part, to the trade pact.

Why immigration has spiked

In recent years, subsidies received by US corn farmers have resulted in overproduction --- flooding the market and causing large dips in the price of the crop. Under Washington’s agricultural subsidy program, in 2000, US corn producers alone received $10.1 billion in payments from the US government ---10 times the Mexican government’s annual agricultural budget. Subsidies are determined by a farm’s land area and historical output; thus, due to these factors, the vast majority of the aid goes to large agribusinesses.

In the United States, the top 10 percent of agricultural subsidy recipients (most of whom earn, on average, over a quarter million dollars per year) receive over 70 percent of the subsidy dollars. There are also provisions for “counter cyclical payments,â€

Moving this to the news section.