By Kenzi Abou-Sabe
The rhetoric that surrounds immigration policy in the United States is largely based on precepts that are both factually inaccurate, and limited in their historical understanding. Most anti-immigration theory rests on a perceived sense that Mexican migrants are exploiting the U.S. tax system, and fleeing a defunct economy to overcrowd the tenuous American economy. What this sort of discourse ignores is how beneficial immigration can be for an economy, the historical effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement that forced many Mexicans to abandon their economy, and the general backwardness of U.S.-Mexican border policy in comparison to the European Union’s.
In Timothy C. Brown’s essay, “The Fourth Member of NAFTA: The U.S.-Mexico Border,” Brown argues that negative perceptions of the border that lend to anti-immigration sentiment are not really founded. He compares the amount that American taxpayers spend on services enjoyed by Mexican undocumented immigrants, to the profit generated by Mexican shoppers in the United States, and the result shows that taxpayers benefit at a margin of 600 percent.[i] The conservative notion that undocumented immigrants exploit the American economy explicitly ignores this context.
Whether or not politicians are aware of statistics like these, reducing the immigration problem to a parasitic issue makes for powerful rhetoric, and many utilize that fact. Donald Trump, vying for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, attested that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists to the United States as immigrants. Statistics show that first-generation immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.[ii] If exploitation is not factually the principal issue of illegal immigration, then there must be another. Brown claims that American xenophobia plays a significant role in the unpopularity of immigration reform: “Americans tend to look down on Mexico as poor, brown, and backward.”[iii] The issue with this specific brand of xenophobia—not that all xenophobia is not an issue, because it is—is that it’s founded in assumptions that are simply not true.
Mexico is not inherently poor because its citizenry is not hardworking, nor is it poor because it is lacking in natural resources. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reoriented the Mexican economy into a so-called, “race to the bottom.” The state of Mexico’s job market and the resulting flux of Mexican migrants to the United States were not wholly caused by NAFTA, but nor are they factors totally independent of American political action. The United States’ international economic policy had an influential hand in the modern Mexican economy, so to believe that Mexicans are running from a broken economy on their own terms ignores a crucial aspect of U.S.-Mexican macroeconomic history.
In 1970, there were only approximately 1 million people of Mexican origin living in the U.S., and by 2000, that number had surged to 9.8 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. During that period, the majority of Mexican demographic growth was due to immigration, and not to the reproduction of Mexican-American nationals, as it had been before 1980.[iv] NAFTA’s implementation in 1994 is hardly a coincidental factor in this population boom.
Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Douglas S. Massey address this economic history in their essay, “Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in Mexico-U.S. Migration.” NAFTA was an international accord that allowed capital to flow freely between the North American states, but unlike within the European Union, it made no corresponding relationship for labor migration. The agreement also directly benefitted American business. In order for Mexico to modernize its economy according to NAFTA, it required loans, which were conveniently made by U.S. banks[v]
In agreeing to NAFTA, then President Salinas of Mexico was attempting to “‘Taiwanize’ Mexico.”[vi] He thought that withdrawing the federal government from the economy would help Mexico prosper, but in reality, all it did was de-incentivize innovation and propagate low value-added labor. This proved especially problematic when Mexico couldn’t compete in the low value-added labor category, suffering from Asian manufacturing and the American and Canadian trade competition opened up by NAFTA.
Mexico’s struggling economy was compounded by the contradictory nature of its agreement with the U.S. and Canada. “The European Union became a supranational category in which citizens were relatively free to cross borders as long as they could support themselves.”[vii] NAFTA was the opposite. The U.S. and Canada didn’t attempt to prop up Mexican development as the U.K. has had to with Greece and Spain. Borders did not become fluid, but were rather staunchly, insultingly defended. In comparison to the success of the EU, many of the U.S.’s policies toward Mexico seem counterintuitive. NAFTA pushed integration in capital, trade, and intelligence, but explicitly prevented integration of labor markets.
The fact that the former powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been transferred to the Office of Homeland Security portrays a state of affairs where immigrants are not job seekers but security liabilities.[viii] The reasons for this are thematic of post-9/11 America, but nonetheless remain slightly illogical. As Fernández-Kelly and Massey point out, tightening the grip on a border the way the U.S. has with its Mexican border actually encourages undocumented immigrants to remain in the country, rather than risking the dangerous process of reverse migration by attempting to return to Mexico.[ix] This contradiction makes the doomsday rhetoric that American politicians assume when arguing that taller fences ought to be built especially ironic.
Part of the “problem” of U.S.-Mexico immigration is the insult and hyperbole that’s often associated with discussing the issue. Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents, writes that, “Public opinion and public political debate have become part of the arena wherein immigration policy is shaped.”[x] This eccentricity of modern immigration policy heightens the relationship between American lawmakers and xenophobic, doomsday-fearing American taxpayers of many ethnicities, and both political persuasions. The public nature of the issue also subjects it to the influence of lobbies, and since lobbies exist to serve their own self-interest and not to propagate the truth, more political rhetoric and less fact is introduced into the debate.[xi]
Today, most immigrants to the United States aren’t Latinos, and most Latinos in the United States aren’t immigrants. The recent and massive influx of young, unaccompanied Latinos into the Southwestern U.S. that prompted President Obama to request billions from Congress in emergency funding wasn’t even a Mexican migration flow. Most of those children came fleeing violence and instability in Central American countries like Guatemala.[xii] The conflation of Mexican and all Latino immigrants is just one such example of how sentiment and perception have diluted the conversation around Mexican immigration in the U.S.
The tension around the subject of immigration then grows, with each new wave. According to Sassen, a cyclical aspect of the immigration climate in the U.S. is that with each new infusion of immigrants, a new group of Americans opposed to immigration solidifies. Sassen explains how Americans often “underestimate the country’s capacity to absorb more people,” but notes, “they also fail to appreciate the political and economic forces that give rise to immigration in the first place.”[xiii] Contrary to popular discourse on both sides of American politics, immigrants in general rarely come to the United States fleeing a destitute financial situation. If they were truly that poor, they would not be able to afford immigrating. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but the majority of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are middle class laborers simply seeking better job opportunities and perhaps a less corrupt, more transparent government.[xiv] Although Mexican immigrants as a demographic group are less well-off than the overall average for immigrants, in 2011, 41 percent of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. had a either a high school diploma or higher.[xv] Even so, this justification of immigrants’ credentials still implies that Americans benevolently, charitably accept immigrants, rather than asserting their acceptance as justified, and based on political and economic precedent.
Conversations about immigration that ignore its history or that glaze over facts in favor of popular sentiment operate in a vacuum, and because of that, the terms they attempt to propagate will always be on poor footing. “The Achilles heel of U.S. immigration policy has been its insistence on viewing immigration as an autonomous process unrelated to other international processes.”[xvi] Some historians say that the success of countries is based upon their constituency’s willingness and ability to forget. To forget ethnic and cultural pasts, and the arbitrary borders that interrupt them. To forget the societal wrongs their countries have imposed—slavery and institutionalized sexism, to name just two—with an eye bent on the future.
America’s convenient memory loss in the case of Mexican immigration disregards the economic manipulation of NAFTA and the ensuing financial chokehold it placed on Mexico’s working class.[xvii] If lawmakers and the public saw the effects of American economic policy the same way they occasionally understand the historic faults of our influence in foreign policy, perhaps discourse on the subject would be more understanding, and better suited to actually address the issue, instead of just inflating it.
Notes
[i] Brown, Timothy C. “The Fourth Member of NAFTA: The U.S.-Mexico Border.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 550 (1997): 105-21. Web. 105
[ii] Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Mark Hugo Lopez. “A Demographic Portrait of Mexican-Origin Hispanics in the United States.” Pew Research Centers Hispanic Trends Project RSS. Pew Research Center RSS, 01 May 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.
[iii] Brown 108, 114
[iv] Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Mark Hugo Lopez
[v] Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey. “Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in Mexico-U.S. Migration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610 (2007): 98-118. Web. 99
[vi] Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey 104
[vii] Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey 105
[viii] Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey 108
[ix] Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey 110
[x] Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York Press: New York, 1998. Print. 9
[xi] Sassen 10
[xii] Shear, Michael D., and Jeremy W. Peters. “Obama Asks for $3.7 Billion to Aid Border.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 08 July 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.
[xiii] Sassen 31
[xiv] Sassen 32
[xv] Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Mark Hugo Lopez
[xvi] Sassen 49
[xvii] Sassen 50
(Cover image courtesy of Eric Gay, AP).