About Time Somebody Said It

The reason we have so many Mexican immigrants streaming across the border (or taking a flight in and overstaying their visa, which is a more popular way to sneak in, actually) is because of structural economic policies:

The debate about illegal immigration rarely mentions the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. That's regrettable, since the flood of illegal Mexicans in 2006 empirically challenges the philosophy that guided NAFTA's design [...]

By raising Mexican living standards and wage levels, Attorney General Janet Reno predicted, NAFTA would reduce illegal immigration by up to two-thirds in six years. "NAFTA is our best hope for reducing illegal migration in the long haul," Reno declared in 1994. "If it fails, effective immigration control will become impossible."

NAFTA succeeded, at least on its own terms. As Jaime Serra Puche, Mexico's former trade minister and chief NAFTA negotiator recently observed, "When you look at NAFTA in terms of what NAFTA was made for, which were trade flows, investment flows, and in general technological transfer and so on, you can say that NAFTA has been a successful enterprise."

Trade now constitutes 55 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, up from about 30 percent in 1990. Foreign investment in Mexico has increased by more than 225 percent since 1994.

So when you look at the pact in terms of what it was intended to do, based on what those who wrote it said it was intended to do, it has been a smashing success.

At this point, bringing up an old medical adage might be appropriate: "The surgery was successful, but the patient died." NAFTA achieved its intended goals. But the flood of illegal immigrants to the United States is up, and the standard of living of the average Mexican is down.

Real wages for most Mexicans are lower than when NAFTA took effect. And Mexican wages are diverging from rather than converging with U.S. wages, despite the fact that Mexican worker productivity has increased dramatically.

Well, what do you expect when the number-one fallout from NAFTA was companies streaming over the border looking to keep down wages by hiring Mexicans for far less than their American counterparts? Greedy companies and impoverished workers who could no longer live on company wages (which increasingly are the only game in town) passed each other on their way across the border.

Trade is not helping Mexico, at least not ordinary Mexicans. The only thing helping them are remittance envelopes from undocumented immigrants over here. Without global labor and environmental standards, there's no way work will be sustainable in third-world countries, and there's no way we'll be able to stop large portions of third-world workers from seeking a better life. David Sirota understands this too:

Fact: Both political parties have joined hands in recent years to ink trade pacts that have destroyed the Mexican economy and created a supply-and-demand imbalance there. The biggest of these was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- a pact sold to the American people as a job creator here, and an economic development tool for Mexico. But, of course, the pact did not include any provisions to protect or increase Mexican workers' wages, workplace standards or human rights, thus all it did was open up a cheap labor pool for companies to exploit.

Fact: A decade after NAFTA's passage, America is still hemorrhaging the good-paying jobs that NAFTA was supposed to create. As for Mexico, the Washington Post's report on the 10-year anniversary of NAFTA told the story: 19 million more Mexicans now live in poverty than before the pact was signed. Similarly, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out, "Mexico's real wages are lower than they were before [NAFTA]." And because NAFTA included no provisions to force companies to improve Mexican working conditions, jobs that were created in Mexico still pay near-slave wages For instance, the Associated Press noted this week that "Many young [Mexicans] have manual jobs on minimum wage of $5 a day."

The corporatists, of course, love cheap labor, and if it flows here, all the better, since they don't have to move their factories. In many ways they're forcing illegals over the border by taking away all their opportunities in their home countries. These people are desperate to provide for their families, and five bucks a day won't cut it. Fixing trade policy, as uncomfortable as that sounds to the "free-trade forever" crowd that rules Washington (Dems and Repubs), is the only way to solve the immigration debate.