Are U.S. Trade Policies & NAFTA Causing
An Influx of Undocumented Workers in U.S.?

A couple of days ago, my buddy Adam, who authors the Shattered Soapbox blog, asked this question in Real Art comments:

Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but no one, not even lefties, seem to be talking about NAFTA in this "immigration debate" (until you just did, sort of). I mean, would so many people from all of Latin America be as desperate for jobs as they are if the U.S.-supported capitolist leaders of many of those countries weren't letting corporations exploit the working class? NAFTA makes it all possible, if I understand it correctly.

adam

Well, okay, so now at least one left-wing news program is talking about it.

From Democracy Now:

Really, what's going on here is that the trade agreements, like NAFTA, and this neo-liberal free trade regime is displacing enormous numbers of people around the world so that worldwide there are about 170 million people living outside the countries in which they were born, and overwhelmingly this is due to the kind of enforced poverty that this free trade regime is producing.

But what is really kind of new here is that the corporate elite, large corporations, are now seeing this flow of people as something that can be used as a whole new source of profit, so that we see proposals for programs, like guest worker programs, in a number of different countries. In Britain, for instance, this is called “managed migration,” and we see the same thing in Europe and, in fact, at the W.T.O. negotiations in Hong Kong, there was a formal proposal introduced called Mode 4, which essentially would set up a huge new international guest worker program. So migration has always been part of the free trade regime, because of the fact that the imposition of this regime displaces people, but now it's becoming even more a part of this regime, because really in a sense the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, financial institutions, large corporations see migration itself as being something that they can turn into a profit.

Click here for to watch, listen, or read the rest.

So there you have it. The xenophobes have already lost. Indeed, they never had a chance. The corporate globalists want immigrant workers, so they're going to get immigrant workers. All this business about fences along the border, Spanish as destroyer-of-English, the Minutemen, all that bullshit, it's just political theater. The future's already been written because money always wins, unless, of course, the people rise up and demand an end to illegals with one unified voice, but I seriously doubt that's going to happen.

So what needs to happen now is to make sure that these workers, all workers really, are treated fairly by our corporate overlords. I wonder if it's possible for the left to somehow get the xenophobes to see this reality, to convince them that their real enemy consists of the wealthy elites who want to rip off everybody. Maybe if they can be shown that they have absolutely no hope of winning, they can be convinced to cut their losses by demanding fair wages and benefits for all. I'm doubtful, but weirder things have happened.

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