Trade deals at core of immigration mess

To genuinely stop illegal immigration, we need to change the rules of economic globalization. Otherwise, no matter how big a fence we build at the border, how strictly we police it and how many local ordinances to crack down on the undocumented we pass, illegal immigration will continue unabated.

All over the planet during the past two decades, masses of people have been migrating in waves from poor, developing countries to industrialized countries. This phenomenon is not unique to the U.S. and certainly not unique to Elgin. It is a direct result of the economic policies which govern the globalization process. Those policies, codified in trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA, give enormous privilege, protection and advantage to multinational corporations and large scale investors. They destroy the livelihoods of working people and poor people.

In the United States, the impact of NAFTA, according to the Economic Policy Institute, was the loss of 879,000 jobs. The American working class has not recovered from this blow. The impact of NAFTA on Mexico was even more devastating; more than a million jobs disappeared there. Incomes of the Mexican middle class were cut in half, and the poor were made destitute.

In the 1990s, many U.S. manufacturing jobs went to Mexico as corporations moved there in search of cheaper labor. Those corporations set up factories where Mexican girls ages 14 to 25 worked long hours under harsh conditions for 25 to 35 cents per hour.

This hurt American workers, and exploited Mexican workers. Then, just as the Mexican workers began organizing to bargain for a few more pennies per hour, the companies moved their factories to China, where they could find even cheaper labor. Mexican workers were left with nothing.

Few Americans realize that our own government has enormous power and influence over the economies of developing countries through international organizations like the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Our government has used that power to insist that those countries, including Mexico, continue to maintain policies which serve the interests of the corporations and big investors, while putting the squeeze on working people and the poor.

Any group of people thrust into the depths of extreme poverty, will migrate if they can find no other way to improve their lives.

When such desperate people migrate to the US, they arrive broke and to some degree traumatized. That's why they live 20 people to a house, and why they lack health and auto insurance. It may take several years for them to earn enough money to begin adopting the middle class values and lifestyle we cherish.

American workers are legitimately alarmed by the flood of immigrants who now compete with them for jobs, especially while decent, living-wage jobs continue to evaporate. Meanwhile, corporations and politicians know how to stir up hatred and turn legal citizens against new immigrants and vice versa.

Divide and conquer is a great strategy for keeping one group fighting another, so that neither group fights back against those powerful people who designed the whole arrangement and profit enormously from the resulting mess.

Tell your legislators of both parties to oppose any new such trade treaties.

Mary Shesgreen

Elgin