Too Close To Call

The Mexican election really does have wide-ranging effects for the US economy and the debate over immigration. A Mexico that makes the right choices about its people, that puts its poor on a track to succeed in their own country, becomes much less of a burden on its Northern neighbor. We don't yet know the outcome of the election, as leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and center-right Felipe Calderon have both claimed victory. And we may not know the answer for a few weeks.

One thing we should hope for is a victory for Lopez Obrador. Otherwise we will be subjected to more of the same Mexican policies that have caused millions of them to cross the border illegally during the neoliberal, "Washington consensus" economic stewardship of Vicente Fox. As a narrow group gets richer, the poor have been battered by NAFTA and forced to scatter. I was encouraged to see a major US newspaper, for the first time I can remember, actually print a story about the realities of NAFTA for all North American workers:

Francisco Herrera Sanchez is not an economics expert and knows little about globalization. But the octogenarian says he knows that something has gone terribly wrong with U.S.-backed trade policies that were supposed to lift millions of Mexicans from poverty.

He has seen hundreds of residents flee this farming community for the United States since 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement began opening Mexico's markets to more low-cost U.S. agricultural products. He feels his neighbors' absence in the meager receipts at his tiny grocery in this hamlet about 3 1/2 hours southeast of the capital. "The riches are up there," said the 85-year-old widower, referring to the U.S. Here "there is nothing, not even music. Just silence, like a dead man hanging."

Many Americans are angry that as many as 12 million illegal immigrants, mostly Mexican, are living in the U.S., driven by lack of opportunities at home. Critics are demanding that Mexico right its stumbling economy, create jobs for its people and end its de facto development strategy of shipping its problems north of the border.

But some experts say U.S. economic policies have played a role in fueling the mass exodus. Pushed hard by the United States, Mexico began embracing the Washington-backed prescription of privatization, free trade and government austerity in the early 1980s. A quarter of a century later, the results are decidedly mixed and are the heart of Sunday's cliffhanger presidential election in Mexico.

There has been an surplus of Mexican trade with the US, but a severe lack of jobs, particularly for subsistence farmers, whose industry has been ravaged by American agribusiness. Nebraska corn shows up in Mexican tortilla manufacturing plants. This is not a level playing field. There's no way a small farmer in Oaxaca can compete with Archer Daniels Midland. And increasingly, that farmer is coming to the US to pick for them, instead. This is why Mexico has lost 30% of its farm jobs since the establishment of NAFTA. And for every job they've gained in the maquiladora factories (read: corporate sweatshops) that line the US border, they've lost four farm jobs. China has undercut their competitive edge as surely as they have the US.

This is an unbelievable statement for an establishment newspaper:

Economist Jeff Faux, author of a new book on globalization, said the current focus of the U.S. Congress on tougher border enforcement ignored the root economic causes pushing migrants north. He said talk of fences, guest worker programs and Mexican government ineptitude diverted attention from U.S.-backed policies such as NAFTA that have helped create the very flood of illegal immigrants that many Americans are now decrying.

"It's really unconscionable that there is no discussion of the American fingerprints on this," said Faux, founding president of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute and author of "The Global Class War." "There is a lot of winking and nodding going on … because it's their business constituents that supported [NAFTA] and that are enjoying the benefits" of low-wage immigrant labor.

A Lopez Obrador victory, and it remains to be seen if that will happen, would at least open a discussion on NAFTA and how these policies are doing nothing but exacerbating the flow across the border. American business certainly doesn't want to have that debate. Neither does the current Administration. It would force them to come to grips with the fact that undocumented workers aren't coming to America because they want to steal hospital and education services. They're here because of awful trade policy.

"An essential part of any migration program designed to reduce the flow [of illegal immigrants] needs to have U.S. efforts to help Mexico develop its own economy," (Pamela) Starr said. "The U.S. has two options. It can import Mexican goods or it can import Mexican workers."