Neoliberal Capitalism and Forced Mexican Migration to the USA

Below is part of an interview by Mark Karlin with David Bacon about Bacon's new book 'The Right To Stay Home,' investigating the circumstances, the effects and attitudes of and towards the huge migrant labour force, particularly in the USA.
Find the whole interview and details of the book here 

Mark Karlin: When people become economic pawns instead of looked upon as human beings with dignity, they often lose their "right to stay home," you argue.  Given the massive government, corporate and global trade forces that create dire economic circumstances in Mexico and Central America - particularly with indigenous populations - where does resistance begin as you discuss in your last chapter?

David Bacon: Resistance begins in the home communities of migrants themselves.  The book describes one of the most important organizations that is calling for resistance and the right to stay home - the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. They were able to get the first non-PRI [dominant political party] governor of Oaxaca to make a commitment to development that could give people some alternative to forced migration.  But this demand is also now being put forward by migrant, especially indigenous migrant organizations throughout Latin America, in the Philippines, and we’re now hearing it in the alternative People’s Global Agenda on Migration gathering that will take place in New York next month during the UN’s high-level dialogue on migration.

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) allowed the dumping of corn, meat and other agricultural products in Mexico at low prices by huge corporations whose costs in the US are subsidized by the US farm bill.  They did this in order to take over the market, and today one company, for instance, Smithfield Foods, sells 25 percent of all the pork in Mexico. That made it very difficult for Mexican farmers to grow crops or raise animals and sell them at a price that would pay the cost of producing them. When they couldn’t survive as farmers, they had to leave home looking for work.

There are today work visa programs for agricultural workers (H2A), lower-skilled non-agricultural workers (H2B) and higher-skilled workers like nurses, teachers and high-tech workers (H1B). All of these visas require someone to work in order to stay, so losing a job means having to leave the country. And they all are based on employers recruiting workers in other countries.
Employers like these programs because they all allow them to hire workers at low wages, lower than what they’d have to pay if they hired people already living in the US, whether citizens or immigrants. And by paying low wages and keeping those workers insecure, they also put them into competition with workers already here. For the guest workers, there is a long history of employer abuse, including cheating on the terms they promise workers when they’re hired, and not paying legal wages or providing the legally required conditions. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls them close to slavery.

The extraction, agricultural and food processing industries are exploiting workers within Mexico and are also polluting indigenous lands making it more difficult to exercise the right to stay home. One of the biggest examples explained in the book is the huge complex of pig farms in the Perote Valley built by Smithfield Foods. The waste from the one million animals raised each year there made the valley almost uninhabitable because of the stink, flies, the pollution of the water table, and disease. Many residents believe that the swine flu of a few years ago began because of the huge concentration of pigs.

Big Canadian mining companies, also profiled in the book, have had a similar devastating impact on the environment in other rural indigenous committees. The contamination itself is a factor pushing people to leave. But the way the economy has been reformed in order to "welcome" foreign companies by violating land rights, paying low wages and fighting unions have deepened poverty and displaced many people.

Their need to work and the poverty of their families forces them to accept low wages, both in Mexico and in the US. The book then describes the way US immigration law is used against them.  In many cases, like the union drive at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, when the immigrants make common cause with workers here and try to organize unions or protest bad wages and conditions, employers then fired them with the cooperation, and sometimes at the orders of, the US government.  So in that sense they become dispensable, at least to their employers.
Illegal People, and now The Right to Stay Home, trace the development of the idea of illegality - how we got the idea that a human being could be "illegal." The roots are clearly in slavery, because the status of a slave, the property of another person, made the slave illegal - the most terrible and brutal form of illegality. But after slavery was formally abolished, these same ideas of inequality and illegality were applied to others - the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Mexicans. Immigration law has become one important way in which that illegal status is forced on people.

Employers want to pay low wages and look for the tools that will keep workers vulnerable and force them to accept these conditions. The displacement of Mexicans by reforms and trade agreements creates a huge number of people who have no alternative to migration, and then to accept work on whatever terms an employer offers. There are so many migrants from Mexico that agriculture, meatpacking and other industries depend on these workers, and employers reap high profits from the low wages they pay. When those workers organize unions to push their wages up, employers fight those efforts out of the simple desire to keep profits high and to control their workforce. That antiunion policy is used by employers against workers in general, not just immigrants, and part of that policy is the effort to keep immigrants and people already here insecure and pit them against each other.

Also the Mexican government has an incentive not to try and improve the economy for the poor and more than that, it uses the remittances sent home to make up for the cuts in the budget for social services in order to make debt payments, which go overwhelmingly to US banks. You could say that the remittances also indirectly subsidize US banks. This is a labor export policy, and other countries are also doing it.

The fact that the US administration deports 400,000 people a year, fires thousand from their jobs, and then negotiates trade agreements that displace people, forcing them to migrate, makes no sense unless you’re deliberately trying to create a huge number of very vulnerable, low-wage workers. It is an inhuman, brutal policy.



The Right to Stay Home looks at Mexico and the US not because these two countries are exceptional, but because by looking at them closely we can understand a process that is going on all over the world. There are over 213 million people living in countries they weren’t born in, 58 million more than 20 years ago. While about 45 million live in the US, you can see this is something happening on a global scale.  So the forces driving it are global, and unfortunately the kinds of policies pushed in the US debate - especially criminalization and guest worker programs - have become global ones also.