March 20, the first day of massive nationwide immigrants rights mobilizations, marked the beginning of a tremendous national surge in civic engagement. From high school students walking out of public school classrooms to dock workers shutting down ports, the spirit, energy and sheer numbers of this movement are inspiring. Even immigrant rights organizations were surprised by this unprecedented wave of public demonstrations.
Is this a new civil rights movement? What challenges—and opportunities—will this pose to the peace movement or to the African-American struggle for racial justice? And how will the masses of Latinos, U.S. citizens, and documented and undocumented immigrants impact the U.S. political landscape in the years to come? Questions like these have been occupying private and public discussion for months.
But one angle that has so far been missing from this dialogue is the role of U.S. corporate-led globalization in causing immigration.
Corporate globalization displaces workers, drives down wages and makes it impossible for many people to earn a decent living in their own countries. Instead of dealing with the real causes of immigration, such as the links between U.S. policies and the desperate conditions that force millions to leave their home countries in search of work, Congress and the Bush administration are dead-bent on treating immigration as an isolated and independent phenomenon.
Unfair, anti-democratic and corporate-led U.S. trade policies are a major cause of immigration. NAFTA was sold as a great economic equalizer that would drastically reduce Mexican migration to the U.S., but an estimated 1.5 million rural families lost their livelihood—and thus faced displacement—when NAFTA lifted barriers to agricultural imports. And real wages in the urban centers fell by more than 20 percent in NAFTA's first five years. So today, Mexico is the largest source of undocumented/hyper-exploited workers for the U.S. economy.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of immigrants to the United States from Mexico actually decreased by 18 percent in the three years before NAFTA's implementation. But since NAFTA, the annual number of immigrants from Mexico has increased by more than 61 percent.
Now, conservative Congresspersons are trying to extend NAFTA-style trade agreements to South America by pushing the Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) on Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. However, AFTA encountered strong grassroots opposition and has been all but scrapped—and even most bilateral trade negotiations are mired in dispute.
Congress and the Bush administration's unwillingness to link immigration to corporate globalization is a clear example of this government's lack of commitment to fair immigration reform and a sustainable continental development strategy.
In fact, the same conservative legislators who voted last year to extend NAFTA to Central America and the Dominican Republic via the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) are now calling for draconian immigration legislation.
They have promoted a national immigration discourse plagued by racism and xenophobia, with Latino immigrants stereotyped as dangerous criminals or even terrorists who undermine the "American way of life."
The Sensenbrenner bill, passed by the House of Representatives, makes felons not only of all undocumented immigrants, but also of all health personnel, teachers, churches and employers who aid them. It further militarizes the U.S.-Mexico border and calls for an Israeli-style wall to be built.
Meanwhile new amendments have been added to the pending Senate immigration bill that create harsh obstacles to legalization, call for a new triple-layer fence on the border at a cost of $3 million a mile; new vehicle barriers, at $1.3 million a mile; and a proposal to hire thousands of new Border Patrol agents, at $170,000 each—and much more. The Congressional Budget office estimates the additional cost of the Senate bill at $25 billion between 2007 and 2011 and an eye-opening $66 billion by 2016. It also includes a guest worker bill designed to provide cheap, disposable labor to corporations, but with no provision for legalization or citizenship for guest workers.
Recently the Senate fanned the fires of anti-immigrant fear by passing an unnecessary bill making English the national language of the United States.
Luckily, immigrant actions signal a positive change in the level of civic engagement by the newest members of our society, and are likely to have important long-term impacts. Yet politicians have a hard time learning important lessons. Former Governor Pete Wilson paid dearly for pushing short-sighted anti-immigrant propositions 187 and 206 in California. In the end these campaigns galvanized the Latino population and its allies to gain citizenship and vote, and brought Wilson's political career to an end.
Now the Sensenbrenner bill is pushing millions of immigrants and their allies into the streets and undoubtedly will send a good number of immigrant sympathizers to the voting booth come next November—hopefully changing the balance of power and putting an end to the Republican political stranglehold.
The House's Sensenbrenner bill is a downright outrage. And the immigration bill under consideration by the Senate is also unfair and punitive. The outcome of a compromise between the two can only be disastrous for immigrants. Consequently the best outcome may be no new legislation at all until the political climate in Congress is changed and the Sensenbrenner bill lapses. No legislation is better than bad legislation.
Global Exchange's main contribution to the immigrant rights struggle is to help build and broaden the movement, especially by drawing the links between disparate struggles for peace and social justice. We are fighting for a trade policy based on pro-people, pro-environment development that will allow people in the Global South to live with dignity, whether in their home countries or in the United States.
