WE CANNOT GO ON WITH THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE IN THE SAME WAY ANYMORE! WE NEED A PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION!
Here it is:
We must treat the root cause of illegal immigration, not the symptoms. We assume they come here because the US is so great. In fact, they come because we are starving them to death through NAFTA!
The EU gave aid to Greece and Portugal to lift their poorer nations up and prevent excess immigration as we have suffered here. Plus there are too many corporate work visas that are totally abused to the tune of 1/2 million a year. The Dems must speak out against and stop these too!
But in Mexico, we must give aid to boost education levels and also give agricultural aid AND STOP DUMPING CORN THROUGH NAFTA:
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are responsible for the impoverishment of and loss of many small farms in Mexico and Haiti. NAFTA is also causing the economic destruction of rural farming communities in the United States and Canada. The resulting loss of rural employment has created a landslide of socio-economic and environmental consequences that are worsening with the continued dismantling and deregulation of trade barriers.
When NAFTA came before Congress in 1993, US farmers were told that the agreement would open the borders of Mexico and Canada, enabling them to sell their superior products and achieve previously unknown prosperity. Corporations who operate throughout the Americas, such as Tyson and Cargill, have since used the farming surplus to drive down costs, pitting farmers against each other and prohibiting countries from taking protective actions. These same corporations have entered into massive farming ventures outside the U.S. and use NAFTA to import cheaper agricultural products back into this country, further undermining the small farmers in the U.S. Since the enactment of NAFTA, 80% of foodstuffs coming into the U.S. are products that displace crops raised here at home. NAFTA has allowed multinational mega-corporations to increase production in Mexico, where they can profit from much cheaper labor, as well as freely use chemicals and pesticides banned in the U.S.
In both Mexico and Haiti, NAFTA policies have caused an exodus from rural areas forcing people to live in urban slums and accept low paid sweatshop labor.
Farmers in Mexico, unable to compete with the large-scale importation and chemical-intensive mass production of U.S. agricultural corporations, are swimming in a corn surplus that has swelled approximately 450% since NAFTA's implementation. Haiti's deregulation of trade with the U.S. has destroyed the island's rice industry in a similar manner. Urban slums, engorged with rural economic refugees, are contributing to the breakdown of cultural traditions and public authority, making the growing masses increasingly ungovernable.
The Mexican government clashes violently with any organized protest of NAFTA. Dissent in Chiapas and in Central Mexico has lead to the reported arrests, injuries, and deaths of dozens of activists. Community leaders like Minister Lucius Walker, executive of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, state that, "The biggest challenge facing all of us in this new millennium is to build a citizens' movement to counter the corporate captivity of the Americas."
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2003/8.htmlA half a billion dollars could start to restore agriculture in the 90 corn-growing regions devasted by NAFTA. This could prevent the immigration of up to a million or more Mexicans a year!
The NW Progressive Institute has the real answer to illegal immigration, now at 3 million per year: develop the Mexican economy and educational system. Not only would this keep Mexican workers at home, it eventually creates new markets for our exports. The important beginning is to let them produce their own food and other items profitably and let wages rise down south as the economy and infrastructure develops.
American exports of corn have tripled, while real prices of corn in Mexico have fallen 70% since 1994! This has affected 15 million Mexican farm families.
The advantages to this approach are numerous, beginning with the avoidance of silly spending on low-wage soldiers running around in the desert trying to catch an evil tide of Jack-in-the-Box counter clerks. If the same dollars were spent on schools, it would give the carpenters among those counter clerks work on that side of the border. Second, and more importantly, it would generate human capital there. And both sooner and later it would generate well-being, a truly indigenous economy, and even real demand for US goods.
Sustainable Development of Mexico is the REAL ANSWER that Progressives should repeat endlessly until the November election. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than building a 1,000 mile fence and spending all that salary and gasoline driving around trying to catch 3 million people a year sneaking over the border.
Non-answers to the immigration problem begin with those of Charles Krauthammer, which include erecting a wall along the entire border and in one motion legalizing those inside the country and slamming a miracle door that keeps everybody else out. This goofiness follows directly after Krauthammer lampoons Bush for thinking he can close the border with a military style action. And of course, there is no shortage of liberal straw men in Krauthammer's analysis.
In fact, liberals like Thom Hartmann have made the case that illegal immigration is a favor to Corporate America because it depresses the price of labor by increasing its supply. He and others have correctly pointed out that if employers of illegals were jailed for hiring them, the flow would be stanched quicker than any size electric fence could accomplish. (Notably, Krauthammer fails to mention this central alternative to the Berlin Wall of the South.)
But the real answer, the economic answer is to provide development support for the populations where they currently reside: Basic investment in roads, utilities and education, not subsidies to factories on the edge of town, whose only mission is to exploit cheap labor before it has to cross the border.
...
Lock them out! Deport them! It is an immigration problem!
In fact, it is an economic problem, a trade problem. To a very real extent, people flood into the US because the economies of their native countries have been decimated by a trade regime instituted by the US. The agriculture that has been the backbones of many of their economies and provided the framework for their societies has been wiped out by cheap American imports.
The point is often made that menials can earn four times the wage here in the United States that they can in Mexico. First, Four times nothing is still not a living wage. Second, People only need self-determination and a chance for survival, not big bucks, and it is these minimum conditions that are becoming scarce.
Since the 1970s the economies of the developed and newly industrial countries have increased steadily, if in some cases not spectacularly. Economies of underdeveloped countries have contracted by one-third. It is not material extravagance these folks are rushing into when they come across the border, it is want they are fleeing. All for the benefit of the industrial farm that has already wiped out the family farm here at home.
http://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2006/05/economic-answer-to-immigration.htmlPlease recommend so we can start up the Echo Chamber on this way to frame the solution. Even Lou Dobbs never mentions this! Let's start with an e-mail campaign to Dobbbs and all the Cable news that this is the REAL ANSWER.
The development must be progressive and sustainable. Regenerate the ability of the land to grow, cut off the agribusiness cheaper food supply as the land regenerates and farming comes back in central and southern Mexico and regenerate the economy and the culture. Mexicans don't WANT to leave their homes. If they could eat and prosper down there, they would stay at home and not come over the border in droves.
And give lots of education aid as the EU did with its southern countries!
Progressive candidates must start speaking the truth on the illegal immigration issue -- or risk not taking the White House and keeping the House in November '08.
Juan Hernandez, a former top Mexican govt adviser, says they had already identified a list of 90 "micro-regions" from which the vast majority of migrants had emanated. This simultaneously highlighted the areas where need was apparently the greatest, and the areas that spawned migration. Unfortunately, as with much of the original hope and promise of the Fox era, not much was ever done w/this plan.
The idea of regional development in the micro-regions where most of the illegals are coming from is perhaps the most important concept here. That makes this whole thing practical and understandable to the voters and maybe even liberal Dem politicians.
Regeneration works by a regional development plan that emphasizes first food self-sufficiency and then moves on from there. (invented by Robert Rodale in the 1980s)
This would cost around $360 million (my estimates) to regenerate the 90 poorest Mexican micro-regions, far less than the several billion dollars to build, staff and maintain a useless border wall.
Of course we must also end the dumping of cheap US agribusiness corn into Mexico.
If you are excited about this new approach for the Democratic Party on immigration K&R this thread and let's talk about it!
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