President Bush is meeting this week with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts for the fourth summit of the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which has become known as 'NAFTA-plus'. Rather than tackle problems that have roots in the NAFTA model—including growing income gaps and worker insecurity in all three countries, as well as dramatically accelerated migration from Mexico to the United States—these leaders hope to quietly extend its reach.

The people of our three countries deserve a strategy for genuine prosperity and human security in North America. Rather than conferring with corporate CEOs about their needs, our leaders should be crafting more rational and humane immigration policies, fair trade policies that put workers and the environment first and security policies that focus on the root causes of drug related violence.

FACT CHECK: NAFTA & Immigration

One of the main promises of NAFTA was that it would create enough jobs to prevent Mexicans from seeking work across the border in the U.S. As Law Professor Stephen Zamora wrote in a Houston Chronicle opinion piece last week, NAFTA's framers' theories that the free trade agreement would spur economic growth in Mexico are "wishful thinking."

In NAFTA's first decade an average of 450,000 undocumented Mexicans crossed the border into the U.S each year, an increase of 160% over the previous decade. Just last Friday the Washington Post reported, "400,000 to 650,000 Mexicans—three-quarters of whom are undocumented—cross the border each year to look for work in the United States, according to Mexican government estimates."

The opportunity gap that has pushed Mexico's out-migration to historic highs under NAFTA helps explain why these summits are being conducted entirely out of public view. Opening the process might force Presidents Bush and Calderón to acknowledge that by artificially divorcing continental trade and investment policy from labor and immigration policy, they are feeding the forces that drive our seemingly intractable immigration dilemma.

FACT CHECK: NAFTA & Food Security

In recent weeks, food riots in Haiti and elsewhere have drawn the world's attention to the food price crisis in poor countries. According to a 2003 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, while the price paid to Mexican corn farmers fell by about half following NAFTA, the price of tortillas has shot up 738 percent—in sharp contrast to promises by NAFTA's boosters that Mexican consumers would benefit from the pact. Earlier this year, tariffs were ended on white corn and beans exported from the United States to Mexico, a move expected to deepen Mexico's rural crisis and further accelerate migration trends.

President's Bush and Calderón should move quickly to protect Mexico's most vulnerable small farmers, the very people who make up a substantial portion of the migrants to the United States. Investing in Mexico's communities will provide opportunities for Mexicans to stay at home and reduce the pressures currently overwhelming the U.S. immigration system.

FACT CHECK: Plan Merida

In the coming months, President Bush is expected to ask Congress to act on his $1.4 billion military and police aid package for Mexico and Central America. We know that arming foreign militaries will not solve our drug problem—a fact now painfully obvious in Colombia. After eight years and over six billion dollars of Plan Colombia, there is as much coca growing in Colombia as there was the year Plan Colombia began, and the flow of illegal drugs to the U.S. continues unabated.

There is no reason to believe that a new "war on drugs" centered on interdiction and enforcement will work any better in Mexico. But the long-term potential damage of a policy that militarizes Mexican society, increases drug-related violence, and creates a climate for violation of human rights and civil liberties is evident.

It is time for the United States to take our role as neighbor seriously, accept the challenge of reducing the demand for illegal narcotics in our country that is the lynchpin in Mexico's drug violence.

Mexico Program Director Ted Lewis can be contacted for further comment at (415) 225-3787.

Global Exchange's Common Sense for the Common Good project focuses research and reporting on the irrefutable link between economic inequalities and rising migration from Mexico to the United States. We believe policies that create greater opportunity at home for Mexico's people are an essential component of any sustainable immigration reform.