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  1. #1
    Senior Member moosetracks's Avatar
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    They say they really want to stay in Mexico!

    In Mexico, ‘people do really want to stay’
    Chicken farmers fear U.S. exports will send more workers north for jobs
    MORE ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM

    By Peter S. Goodman
    http://www.americaneconomicalert.com/ne ... ID=2430691
    Updated: 7:13 a.m. ET Jan 7, 2007
    PEGUEROS, Mexico - Even as his village emptied, Pedro Martin stayed behind. His schoolmates abandoned the scrub-covered hills of central Mexico for the land they called El Norte-- the North. They mopped floors in Fresno, poured concrete in Tempe and tended other people's children in Galveston, measuring their lives in dollars.

    Martin worked at a poultry farm. His wages rose to 2,000 pesos per week, about $185. Meager by the standards of the north, it was enough to build a brick house with white tile floors. Enough to buy a car, and to stay in the village and watch his three boys grow, resisting the gravitational pull the United States exerts on much of rural Mexico.




    "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well," Martin said, as church bells echoed down lanes of pastel-painted houses. "You feel out of place. Here, you can walk around the whole town and it's comfortable. Life is easier."



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    But now, Martin worries that life in the central Mexican state of Jalisco is about to be shaken by globalization. Already much of Mexico's farm country has been overwhelmed by an influx of crops from the United States in the years following the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over the next two years, the final provisions of the trade pact kick in, opening Mexico to unlimited imports of poultry from its northern neighbor. Mexican farms will compete directly with an American agribusiness nurtured by subsidies on the corn that feeds the birds.

    "If a lot of chicken comes in from the United States, we're not going to be able to maintain our farms," said Martin, 39. "What's going to happen? People are going to get fired. People are going to go north."

    NAFTA, as the landmark trade agreement is known, was supposed to work the other way around. In the early 1990s, as politicians in the three countries of North America sold the pact, they promised it would spur enough development in Mexico to create millions of jobs, raise wages and diminish the lure of the north.

    But since 1994, the year NAFTA took effect, Mexico's economy has grown sluggishly. Not enough jobs have materialized, while Mexico's working-age population has swelled. Meanwhile, the United States has been a magnet for Mexican laborers willing to take on low-paying, unpleasant work.

    More than 6.2 million Mexicans now live in the United States illegally, according to Mexico's National Council of Population. Two-thirds arrived after NAFTA.

    For Mexico, as for most developing countries, free trade was a gamble. It opened the world's most lucrative market, the United States, to wares produced in Mexico's factories, and to produce grown on Mexican soil. But it also lifted protections on Mexico's manufacturers and farmers, bringing an influx of products from the north.

    As NAFTA's final provisions take effect next year, tying Mexico's fortunes more tightly to world markets, how will its economy adjust? And how will the latest wave of trade liberalization alter the calculations for millions of Mexicans wanting to stay home, but constantly feeling the tug of the north?
    http://www.americaneconomicalert.com/ne ... ID=2430691


    "If you want to buy a house, you have to go to the States," Escobar said. "People go to America to make their Mexican dream come true."

    HUH??? Oddly, border enforcement may have stifled some of Mexico's gains. In a paper presented to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Raymond Robertson, an economist at Macalester College, found that Mexico's increased foreign trade has been a factor pushing wages up at home, but that has been countered by the intensification of U.S. border security, which has kept people in Mexico, leaving more workers competing for jobs and pushing wages down. (He must mean like here, when there are too many people, our wages go down....too bad he doesn't worry more about his own people.)




    Two hours south, in the village of Ejido Modelo Emiliano Zapata, Ruben Rivera sat on a bench in a forlorn plaza, rather than working on his seven-acre farm. He used to grow tomatoes and onions, hiring 150 workers to help at harvest. Now he doesn't even bother to plant. He can buy onions in the supermarket more cheaply than he can grow them. A crop of tomatoes yields less than the taxes. He lives off the $800 sent home monthly by his three sons, who run a yardwork business in Macon, Ga.

    "For people who can grow huge scale for export, NAFTA has been good," he said. "For people like us, it's been a bloodbath."

    "People do really want to stay," the mayor said, but with the pull of the north, almost half his town's official population of 19,000 has decamped for the United States. "We're basically exporters of people."



    Pedro Martin, still at home while so many friends and relatives make their lives in another country, is intent that his three boys -- 13, 8 and eight months -- stay in Mexico. On a recent morning, as firecrackers boomed in salute to Mexico's patron saint, Guadalupe, a procession of shiny SUVs pulled into Pegueros, their license plates advertising the riches of Texas, Virginia and California. People were returning for Christmas.

    Martin professed no envy. His sister and her two boys are crammed into an $1,100-a-month apartment in San Francisco. The boys have to work to help pay the rent. "They're thinking of returning," Martin said. His own boys are growing up with the fresh air and broad vistas of Jalisco.

    "If there are corn subsidies in the United States and none here, we're dead," said Lorenzo Martin, president of the Tepatitlan Poultry Farmers Association and the head of one large producer. "If the U.S. starts selling things extra cheap outside the U.S., then it won't just be small farmers and individuals who will be leaving. It will be people like me."
    Do not vote for Party this year, vote for America and American workers!

  2. #2
    Senior Member Richard's Avatar
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    The pessimists have it wrong the ethanol industry is soaking up a lot of the corn production that America has recently exported to Mexico.

    Mexico's transportation system is less well developed than ours. If corn costs less here in the United States that does not mean that it still costs after they ship it in.

    America's corn exports are all yellow corn. Before NAFTA Mexican industrial farmers grew yellow corn protected by tarriffs. After NAFTA they produced white corn and son took over the suppy of white corn for industrial millers from the rural village producers.
    The Mexican villagers should think in terms of white corn production for local processing and consumption. As the American ethanol industry absorbs yellow corn and drives up prices there will be incentive for Mexican idustrial farmers to turn fields back to yellow corn. Comparative advantage in the production of white corn by villagers will be rising.
    I support enforcement and see its lack as bad for the 3rd World as well. Remittances are now mostly spent on consumption not production assets. Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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    Senior Member kniggit's Avatar
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    "You feel out of place. Here, you can walk around the whole town and it's comfortable. Life is easier."
    Funny, thats the way it used to be here....
    Immigration reform should reflect a commitment to enforcement, not reward those who blatantly break the rules. - Rep Dan Boren D-Ok

  4. #4
    MW
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    Senior Member MW's Avatar
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    Has anyone in the U.S. Congress even attempted to repeal NAFTA? The sucker barely passed the first time. IMHO, the time is right to seek reversal of an obviously flawed piece of legislation. Is NAFTA so taboo that it's untouchable?

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

    Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts athttps://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  5. #5
    Senior Member Neese's Avatar
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    In Mexico, ‘people do really want to stay’
    Finally...something we can all agree on.

  6. #6
    Senior Member redbadger's Avatar
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    They should go home and kick political butt...and clean that pit of snakes up...so we can clean up our own house
    Never look at another flag. Remember, that behind Government, there is your country, and that you belong to her as you do belong to your own mother. Stand by her as you would stand by your own mother

  7. #7
    nowayjoseillegals's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neese
    In Mexico, ‘people do really want to stay’
    Finally...something we can all agree on.
    It would sure make my day if they stay [in Mexico] :P
    "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- Mark Twain

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