Thread: Mexico's part in the immigration puzzle

Mexico's part in the immigration puzzle


U.S. MUST FOCUS ON ECONOMIC FORCES IN MEXICO THAT CAUSE SOME TO SCALE WALLS IN SEARCH OF NEW LIFE
By Katherine Corcoran

Article Launched:*06/17/2007 01:43:25 AM PDT


When I reported from Mexico last year during the record-setting immigrant marches here in the United States, I conducted my own unscientific poll on the immigration issue among people I met.


"What should the United States do about illegal immigration?" I asked everyone from street vendors to academics at the venerable National Autonomous University of Mexico. Each time, the respondent would tick off a long list without missing a beat, starting with a flood of vitriol against the proposed wall and the placement of the U.S. National Guard at the border.


Then I would ask: "What should Mexico do about illegal immigration?"


In every case, there was a pause, followed by the same answer: "It's very complicated."


Here's what Mexico has done about illegal immigration: Provided 3-to-1 matching funds for every dollar of remittance money sent home by immigrants in the United States for public works projects. Remittances, at an estimated $20 billion a year, are the country's second-highest source of income.


Here's what else Mexico has done: Created a federal bureaucracy called Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior and state-level agencies that provide services to Mexican nationals living abroad - after they're driven out by a lack of viable employment and government help at home.


That our U.S. leaders continue to try to solve a two-sided problem without enlisting the other side is baffling.


At the same time, it's no surprise that the latest attempt at a legislative solution crashed and burned in the U.S. Senate, though there was still talk last week of a revival. The total sum of the United States' one-sided strategy vacillates between "keep 'em out" and "let 'em in," even though we've tried both and neither has solved the problem.


What did amnesty in 1986 bring us? The same thing the 1994 enforcement crackdown called Operation Gatekeeper brought us: today's estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants with no path to citizenship, and no end in sight to the flow of people crossing the border.


Even conservatives concede that walls won't stop migrants as long as wages here are seven to eight times those in Mexico on average, with the disparity much more drastic for the very poor who live on less than $4 a day. Even liberals admit that amnesty only creates more illegal immigration.


So why not address the forces that cause people to scale walls, no matter how high we build them? Because that would require neighbors to work together on matters of economics, and that would be too hard.


On the U.S. side, it's easier to scapegoat the very people getting squeezed, not so different from what happened to the Chinese who came in droves in the mid-19th century to work the gold mines and build the railroads.


Racism is "as American as apple pie," says Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. "Americans don't want to integrate that closely with brown-skinned people who have been cast as a threat and a demonized `other.´"


One reason the Senate bill fell apart was because some senators didn't think it sufficiently punished the little guy - people who come for work that is actively marketed to them through channels both formal and informal. As one of many roadblocks, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, tried to tack on an amendment that would make a violation of immigration laws one of the crimes prohibiting people from gaining permanent status.


Yet while U.S. legislators are going after the little guy, they simply are not ready to crack down on U.S. employers. The current lack of workplace enforcement is really a form of "employer amnesty," and the electronic employee verification system in the Senate bill has been derided by both employers and workers' rights advocates as an error-prone plan that would be turned over to a federal bureaucracy that can't even handle a flood of passport applications.


`Lot of blame to go around´
"Border enforcement can't be the center of your policy," said Steven Camarota, director of research for the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies. "It's fair to say a lot of people in the Republican Party have no intention of cracking down on employers. But there's a lot of blame to go around. Successive administrations, Republican and Democrat, have undermined the law in this area."


On the Mexican side, it's easier to bad-mouth the United States while biding time on the internal reforms needed to create work in a country that, by conservative estimates, is short 300,000 jobs a year. (Some put the number as high as 1 million.) Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos, the famous saying goes, which is loosely translated as, "God must not like Mexico because He put it so close to the United States." Yet the U.S. border has been Mexico's savior, serving as the pressure valve for those who are mad as hell and can't take it anymore - and keeping political unrest at a relative minimum at home. (In China, where there is no border escape, the communist government is frantically growing the middle class on the theory that a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot will prevent a billion-plus people from rising up. Even so, it's tamping down protests regularly.)


Illegal immigration is also a financial resource for Mexico, as Mexican workers here send their wages back home. "Having remittances compensates for the lack of performance of the Mexican economy," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic Policy and Research. "It's an outlet for workers they're not providing jobs for, and a major source of income, like having another export."


The result of the status quo, of course, is inhuman treatment on both sides of the border, including immigration and customs enforcement raids that tear pregnant women from their families and, in one case in San Francisco, the holding of an American-born 7-year-old in lockup because the only adult available to care for him was swept up in one of those raids.


Visit the remote villages of Oaxaca, where homes have tarp roofs and dirt floors and residents have to hike for potable water, and visit squalid migrant housing in the Central Valley, and then ask yourself which living conditions you would prefer?


"These are God's children," U.S. Sen. John McCain said in a recent presidential debate, imploring Christian conservatives to see the immigration debate in human terms.

In one of the crueler ironies I've encountered, I interviewed a farmworker last year in the Salinas Valley who was from coastal Oaxaca, where he couldn't find work in the only viable industry there - tourism - because he couldn't speak English. So he came to the United States.


Invest in Mexican jobs


So what are the alternatives?
For starters, why not take the estimated $2 billion-plus to build the border wall, plus Mexico's 300 percent matching funds for remittances, and invest in Mexican job creation and infrastructure?
Massey, of Princeton's Office of Population Research, is one of many who propose a European Union model for North American countries.


"Instead of spending billions to militarize the border, we should spend millions of dollars in subsidies to improve Mexican economic performance. That's what the European Union did for Spain and Portugal and what it's now doing for Eastern Bloc countries," he said. "We also have to recognize that if we're integrated economies, people move across the border. You can't have integrated economies and not have people moving back and forth. So you have to create legal channels for them to do so."


And Mexico would need only to make some progress in wage disparities - not equalize wages - in order to have an effect on migration.


"People pay a price to come - monetarily and psychically. Long before we get to 1-to-1 pay rates, migration will slow down a lot," said Jeffrey Passel, a Pew Hispanic Center immigration and demography expert. "It doesn't have to be exactly equal for people to decide they want to stay in their homes."


Those who don't support investments and cooperation say simply stopping the flow of immigration will force the necessary changes in Mexico.
"I think the best thing we could do for Mexico is to curtail immigration from Mexico. One of the things that will create is pressure from within for reform," said Camarota, adding that it's hubris to think the United States could effect change in Mexico. "Reform in Mexico - as shocking as this may sound - can only be done by Mexicans."


Changes across border


Experts on this side of the border say they see movement in that direction on the part of the Mexican government, which talks with its U.S. counterparts through the U.S.-Mexico Interparliamentary Group and other diplomatic channels, albeit very quietly.
Members of Congress applauded a 2006 Mexican resolution called "Mexico and the Migration Phenomenon," as "the first public acknowledgment that Mexico must accept responsibility for solving the immigration problem," according to a letter signed by Cornyn and former Republican U.S. Jim Kolbe.


U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, says she sees the Mexican government starting to focus on the downsides of migration out of the country, as Mexico's birth rate has plummeted and its population begins to age - just like its neighbor to the north. Mexico is also seeing more of its educated ranks - trained teachers, lawyers and accountants - leaving to do manual labor in the United States.


"Unlike President Fox, President Caldero`n has been more low key and more vocal in conveying Mexico´s responsibility to the issue," says Armand Peschard-Svedrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "At the end of the day, he understands that this is a loss for Mexico. ... The risk-taking entrepreneurs are making the trek to the United States. And the U.S. benefits from having that type of individual in the country."


But realizing a problem and building consensus for reform are two different things. Turning Mexico's economy would be something like "trying to make a fast turn on a ship the size of the Titanic," says Alex Saragoza, a University of California-Berkeley history professor and faculty member at the university's Center for Latin American Studies.
NAFTA deal in 1984


The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to help. But in the short term, it created an agricultural crisis that has pushed small farmers off their land and on the road to El Norte. Saragoza says it will be years before there is significant change. In just one example, proposals to reform Mexico's tax structure, which currently can't support the schools and infrastructure needed to spur economic growth, have languished in the Mexican congress.
"The current tax structure benefits the privileged and the wealthy," he said, "and the political capital is against reform."


So when it comes to fixing the immigration problem, political gridlock grips both sides of the border.


"Mexico would be best served by reform and greater transparency, but they can't act in their own best interest," Camarota said. "That's what we share, because the interests of the United States are not being served."


Copyright 2007 San Jose Mercury

Katherine Corcoran
San Jose Mercury


Ms Corcoran,


If the investment to create new jobs in Mexico comes from the American government through the Mexican government the politicians will be benefiting disproportionately. If the investment is corporate then the corporations, wealthy and professionals. The best way for the concerned to channel investment into Mexico in order for it to benefit the average Mexican with friends and relatives here is to have the remittance senders insist that beneficiaries use them for investment not consumption.


Rather than the beneficiaries buying processed food they should grow their own and buy local there as much as possible and then consume their own food product. The largest modernized Mexican industry is manufactured food. As it is there are corporations which are selling to the remittance beneficiaries which could use their skills to export. It sometimes requires only their using an American brand and label to sell food from Mexico here. Would people be surprised at seeing "made in Mexico" on canned chili, tomatoes and beans.


The savings from home production of food can be invested back into agricultural expansion or other forms of advancement. The main durable expenditures made by the Mexican immigrants tends to be spent on modern houses when they should be spent on barns warehouses and on factory shells. There is a good market for house rentals in cities and resorts but much of their immigration here comes from rural areas.


San Jose Mercury News - Mexico's part in the immigration puzzle
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_6162871


The other point is that there is a tighter back channel between the Mexican government and the Anti Amnesty movement than most people realize. I am organizing protests here although my second cousin was the head of Mexican IME and I talk regularly with an activist in the Partida Accion Nacional. There are Mexicans who do not want to see the Z visa renewed.


Richard

Trying to unravel the corruption in Mexico is like thinking you can stop fighting in the Middle East. The parties involved are too vested in the corruption EVER allow it to stop. It's a lifestyle.

I've spent a lot of time in Mexico, it will not change no matter what some do gooder thinks. We need to cut them off and let them sink. We need to stop being their relief valve. Only when it gets so bad that there is an uprising can it change. Why do you think they don't respect our laws?

Welcome JECG

Did you read about promoting food local self sufficiency what do you think?