Reagan’s Refugees: Why Undocumented Migrants Have a Right to Work Here

From AlterNet:

This is the reality that none of the opponents of this “illegal” immigration want to face. And it is a reality that even the advocates of change have not fully articulated. In essence, the neoliberal economic policies of the so-called Washington consensus, including NAFTA, have plunged Mexico into an economic crisis in the countryside. More than 2 million agricultural workers have been forced off their land and have moved into urban areas that can’t absorb them. The undocumented workers from El Salvador and Guatemala, the two other main sources of migration into the U.S., are fleeing dysfunctional and oppressive social and economic systems maintained by U.S. military power and funding since Ronald Reagan and CIA director William Casey turned these small countries into demonstration projects for Cold War power. As a result of these interventions, the U.S. has blocked democratic social change in these countries, sustained the exploitative legacy of the conquista and kept the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of rich, uncontrolled oligarchies.

In other words, Arizona is facing “blowback,” the natural consequences of failed U.S. policies trumpeted by the Arizona-style conservatives. These undocumented workers are economic refugees fleeing from broken economic systems — and they have every right to work here to earn the living that they cannot earn in their home countries. It’s a form of economic reparations.

And

These economic and social problems are precisely why the U.S. will never solve the problem by enforcement, no matter what kind of walls we build or border patrol we fund. The “push” out of these countries has become much greater than the “pull” of a better economy and growing social networks of migrants now living in the U.S.

More here.

Okay, this is a very good point.

Indeed, if you had to describe US foreign policy since WWII, loosely, it might go something like this: prevent all industrially underdeveloped nations from becoming American-style powerhouse economies such that the US can dominate the world. There are some notable exceptions, of course. Western Europe and Japan needed to redevelop after the war such that they would be resistant to to communist influence--we found alternative methods of pushing them around, such as insisting that we house masses of US troops there to defend against China and the Soviet Union, while also insisting that these exception-nations avoid bulking up their own militaries. There are some notable failures, as well. Pretty much any nation that managed to tell the US to fuck off, taking their own independent routes to economic development, ended up, well, developing. Venezuela, and, in the end, China are two examples.

But everybody else, either through IMF handouts-with-strings and the like, or economic subterfuge, or straight-up military intervention, continues to be economically fucked up, and therefore easily dominated by the US. It comes as absolutely no surprise, then, that US policy is greatly responsible for the masses of illegal immigrants coming here to seek work. Actually, I'm kind of bummed that I had to have an internet article point out to me what should have been obvious. But obvious it is: if the US had been spending the decades since the "Greatest Generation" fought the bad guys making a good faith effort to make better the lives of people worldwide, we wouldn't be having to deal with an illegal immigrant problem. Or, at least, the problem would be so small, it wouldn't merit much of a mention in public discourse.

On the other hand, notions of "economic reparations" aside, absorbing enormous populations of displaced workers into our domestic economy strikes me as self-destructive. That is, I continue to be concerned by the role that illegal immigrants play in depressing wages here in the US. So I amend my policy recommendation on this issue. In addition to heavily cracking down on the capitalist assholes who flagrantly exploit these twice oppressed workers of the world, I now also believe that US foreign policy needs a monumental shift in priorities. That is, we need to devote American resources to helping foreign economies actually develop, instead of simply saying so we are while doing the opposite.

Don't get me wrong. I fully understand that, at this point, this is not much more than wishful thinking. But it's the only way. When people have real jobs in their home countries that can really pay the bills, they'll have no need to come here. Unless we radically change this neoliberal corporate globalism model, whatever you want to call it, the illegal immigrant problem will only worsen. And Arizona type harassment laws will do nothing to stem the tide.

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