Displaced People: NAFTA's Most Important Product
Bacon, David
dAvid BAcon SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Displaced People: NAFTA’s Most Important Product Salomon Sarita Sánchez and a crew of mixtec immigrants from oaxaca, mexico, on a strawberry farm...
...companies were allowed to buy land and factories, false...
...And an immigration policy policies...
...grain was supposed to make consumer prices intervention to help them, those farmers paid Mexico’s urban poor fared no better...
...NarcoNews, April 10, 2007, available at narcosphere.narconews.com...
...Treasury Secretary Robert aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to Mexico, which was toward structural adjustment...
...Displaced migrant workers are the back- should fight for the right of people to choose when and bone of this contingent labor system...
...15...
...Roberto González Amador and David Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo altos precios de alimentos: FMI,” La Jornada, April 11, 2008...
...It’s like slavery...
...González Amador and Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo...
...Without this restraint, the auto giants be- Contrary to NAFTA proponents’ predictions, the treaty became an important source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate...
...3. North American Transportation Statistics Database, “Transportation and the Economy,” Table 2-3, “Employment in Transportation and Related Industries,” available at nats.sct.gob.mx...
...Peter Rosset, “La hora de La Vía Campesina,” La Jornada, May 9, 2008...
...The commission was inactive through which the government bought corn at subsidized until 1988, but began holding hearings when the U.S...
...2 (1991...
...12...
...Work stops...
...In the tiny Mexican towns that now provide workers, are called “comprehensive immigration reform...
...When since if one employer has an advantage, others will seek demand is high, employers recruit workers...
...10...
...capitalist development railroad workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their since the 19th century—in times of prosperity, by the injobs, but they lost and their union became a shadow of its corporation of large numbers of workers in agricultural, former self in Mexican politics...
...While California farmworkers 20 and r s y’ countr in Mexicans placing 1993, in A) (NAFT eement Agr rade ee Fr ince T the passage of the north american other economic reforms the are uprooting most and emote dis 30 - several new bilateral trade agreements with years ago came from parts of Mexico with larger Peru, Jordan and Chile, as well as the Central Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today American Free Trade Agreement...
...11...
...One economy is intensive in numbers of undocumented people, since illegality creates capital, which is the American economy...
...To Calderón and employers on Companies depend not just on the workers in the fac26 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 At the same time, companies dependent on this imreport: mexico ii tories and fields, but also on the communities from which porate program for U.S...
...Immigration policy determines crash and the NAFTA reform engineered by Treasury Secretary Rubin, together with New York’s financial expropriation of Mexican finances between 1995 and 2000, once the rules under which that labor is put to use...
...15...
...19...
...3. Víctor Quintana, “Saldos del TLCAN,” La Jornada, December 31, 2002...
...It is the financial crashes and the economic dithose factories shrank during U.S...
...Los campesinos del siglo XXI,” Nueva Sociedad no...
...Since 1994, 6 U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the Larreas, be- million Mexicans have come to live in the United States...
...To slow or halt this flow, it recommended nAFtA was part of a process that began from the fluctuations of the world market...
...8. Adam Prezeworski, Michael Álvarez E., José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164–68...
...No one impossible to stop...
...9. Alejandro Nadal, “Maíz, cosechar tempestades,” La Jornada, January 17, 2007...
...and prices, turned it into tortillas, and sold them in state-franCanadian governments signed a bilateral free trade agree- chised grocery stores at subsidized low prices, was abolished...
...free-market and free-trade policies exert pressure to cut the “The governments of both Mexico and the U.S...
...According to a report to the Inter- people come...
...14...
...both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, migration is therefore a labor-supply system...
...ment...
...And employers benefit from large “You have two economies...
...immigrants to industries when their labor is needed, and At the same time, migrants should have basic rights, remove them when it’s not...
...To raise the low price of immigrant labor, mand falls, those workers not only have to leave their immigrant workers have to be able to organize...
...3. Alejandro Estivill, conference on SPP, Universidad de las Américas (Cholula), June 12, 2008...
...Rural families went hungry when they Bush and to Congress in 1990...
...imimpoverished people to migrate north...
...A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices “promoting greater economic integration be- below the cost of production...
...Penalizing us by making it illegal for us to foreign banks...
...González Amador and Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo...
...The cost of these services is now borne by workers themselves, in the form of remittance payments sent back from jobs in Nebraska slaughterhouses, California fields, or New York office buildings...
...Similarly, U.S...
...12 (May–August 1992): 189–206...
...Department of Agriculture...
...A less entrapped tween the migrant sending countries and the government might have bought the crops of VeUnited States through free trade...
...Remittances, as large as they are, cannot work won’t stop migration, since it doesn’t deal with why make up for this outflow...
...Ibid...
...recessions...
...8. Luis Hernández Navarro, “La guerra de los alimentos,”La Jornada, October 22, 2002...
...manufacturing, service, and other sectors, and in periods After NAFTA the privatization wave expanded...
...One economy is an inexpensive system...
...grain dumping...
...Mexican sidies to compete in Mexico’s own market with corn from huge auto parts workers lost their jobs by the thousands...
...real family, and its telephone company to the richest person in 24 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Mexico, Carlos Slim...
...190 (March/April 2004): 37–50...
...Rights, available at cciodh.pangea.org...
...9. John Ackerman, “Democratización: pasado, presente y futuro,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos: Revista de la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede México 14, no...
...Between just 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost a million eventually anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners...
...history...
...Víctor Quintana, “Drug Trafficking, Violence and Repression,” CIP Americas Program, May 8, 2008, available at americas.irc-online.org...
...3. Jorge Carpizo, El presidencialismo mexicano (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1994), 121– 22...
...14...
...vices of America, Hutchinson, and TMM now operate the But from 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive ecocountry’s largest shipping terminals...
...5. Comisión de Desarrollo Rural de la Cámara de Diputados, La soberanía económica de México en riesgo, cited in La Jornada, November 28, 2002...
...Rich Mexicans weren’t the only beneficiaries of privatizaIn NAFTA’s first year, 1994, the Mexican economy colsuffering...
...Mexican president them...
...By no sense to promote more free-trade agreements and then partially meeting unmet and unfunded social needs, remittances are indirectly subsidizing the banks.9 condemn the migration of the people they displace...
...Agricultural NAFTA was part of a process that began long before, in exports to Mexico grew at a meteoric rate during the NAFTA which economic reforms restructured the Mexican economy...
...It concluded racruz farmers to keep them afloat, or provided that “the United States should expedite the de- subsidies for other crops...
...Solutions to organizer...
...It makes payments, however, accounted for a good deal more...
...minimum wage and housing requirements, the Southern Corporations and those who benefit from current priPoverty Law Center report, “Close to Slavery,” documents orities might not support a more pro-migrant alternathe fact that the requirements are generally ignored...
...4. “Aprueban diputados que se penalice el delito de terrorismo . . . ,” La Jornada, February 21, 2007...
...usda.gov...
...family at home together,” says Harvard historian John There is no starker reminder of Mexico’s dependency on the Womack...
...Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño has been questioned for signing contracts with his family’s oil company while serving in public office...
...The rosy predictions as sur or living a no who ll of can these longer policies make produce displaced vive peopl of e NAFTA’s boosters that it would slow migration proved tion...
...9. Inter-American Development Bank, “Remittances and Development: The Case of Mexico” June 28, 2005, available at www.iadb.org...
...report: mexico ii David Bacon is a which provided support for this analysis...
...But once free market velopment of a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and strictures were in place, prohibiting government encourage its incorporation with Canada into a North American free trade area,” while warning that “it takes the price...
...Facing privatization, linked to the different stages of U.S...
...Instead, Congress must end the use of the free-trade system as a mechanism for producing displaced workers...
...He adds that the financial 25 25 dAvid BAcon NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico ii mauro lópez, a 22-year veteran mechanic at the Cananea mine...
...As the million to nearly 12 million.4 With few green cards or Larreas and Union Pacific moved to boost profits and cut la- permanent residence visas available for Mexicans, most bor costs, Mexican rail employment dropped precipitously.3 of these migrants were undocumented...
...Israel Rodríguez J. , “El alza en alimentos cuesta a México 5 mil mdd: Banxico,” La Jornada, May 4, 2008...
...Leoncio Vásquez, an activist with the FIOB in Fresno, that the commission established by the IRCA was charged California, says, “The lack of human rights itself is a factor with recommending measures to halt or slow it...
...6. Associated Press, “Mexican President Decries Anti-Immigrant Tone,” February 14, 2008...
...Otherwise,” Domínguez Guest-worker and employment-based visa programs says, “wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, were created to accommodate these labor needs...
...have both produced migration and criminalized Immigrants (Beacon migrants...
...But sions for amnesty and employer sanctions, few have noted NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hunan important provision of the law: the establishment of the dreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell Commission for the Study of International Migration and Co- corn or other farm products for what it cost to produce them...
...18...
...Verónica Martínez, “Refleja México ineficiencia en agro,” Reforma, April 29, 2008...
...As with the railroads, nomic reforms produced more migrants...
...2. WTO study cited in Reuters, “Países en desarrollo pierden 24 mil mdd por subsidios al agro,” published in La Jornada, August 27, 2003...
...17...
...He wears a jacket with the logo of the mine’s private owner, Grupo méxico, which by the early 1990s owned most of the country’s formerly nationalized mines...
...José M. Maravall, “Economía y regimenes políticos,” Working Papers, Instituto Juan March, no...
...United States, 300,000 in California alone...
...Its guiding principle how to migrate, including the derecho de no migrar—the is that immigration policy and enforcement should direct right not to migrate, given viable alternatives...
...7. Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, “Fact Sheet: Fair and Secure Immigration Reform,” January 7, 2004...
...immigration policy in 2006 and 2007 tried to come to grips with the policies doesn’t stop people from coming into the country, nor is that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters, and farmers, it intended to...
...1 long before, in which economic reforms restructured the mexican economy...
...employment for them...
...25...
...encourage technological modernization by strengthening and assuring intellectual property protection and by relapsed when the peso was devalued without warning in moving existing impediments to investment” and recomDecember...
...came the owner of the country’s main north-south rail line In just five years, from 2000 to 2005, the Mexican-born and immediately discontinued virtually all passenger service, population living in the United States increased from 10 as railroad corporations had done in the United States...
...Its employment system is based employed, they will never have enforceable rights...
...José Galán and Laura Poy Solano, “Abierta violación al espíritu constitucional: expertos,” La Jornada, April 28, 2007...
...Ribero, “Agrocombustibles...
...banks...
...The two Sandoval emphasizes that “Mexican labor has always been spent years in prison for their temerity...
...We are wealth but receive a smaller share than other workers in retwo complementary economies, and that phenomenon is turn—a source of profit for those who employ them...
...Instead, the prodisplaced, and that the country’s economy can’t produce ducers themselves are called “illegal...
...The negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months cheap U.S...
...2. USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service, “Mexico: Trade,” available at www.ers...
...Displacement is an unmentionable word in the Washingmigration policy should be to “connect willing employers and willing employees...
...That migrant stream gain greater flexibility in adjusting for the also means delinking immigration status and employment...
...Domínguez says there are about 500,000 senior fellow at the tionship to the waves of displaced people mi- indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the Oakland Institute, grating to the United States, looking for work...
...immigration reform, and are they come...
...Hubert Cartón de Grammont, “El mercado de trabajo en el campo: unas reflexiones a partir de la lectura del libro Portraits de Bahia, de Hèléne Rivière d’Arc,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología no...
...13...
...southwest...
...41...
...Associated Press, “Report: Mexican Army Used Rape, Torture in Drug War,” September 21, 2007, available at www.usatoday.com...
...Congress has debated and passed areas...
...Juan Antonio Zúñiga, “Creció 55 por ciento la importación de alimentos básicos en los pasados seis años,” La Jornada, January 16, 2007...
...trade and immi- ing to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or photojournalist, gration policy are part of a single system, and any pretense of equality with people living in and former labor the negotiation of NAFTA was an important step the communities around them...
...21...
...NAFTA, they claimed, came Mexico’s largest retailer...
...6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 13...
...Ibid...
...Although a flood of and price controls, the price of tortillas more than doubled in of the report...
...on the use of contractors, which is replacing the system in The root problem with migration in the global econwhich workers were directly employed by the businesses omy is that it’s forced migration...
...support for paid to bondholders, mostly U.S...
...workplaces and communities, and the freedom to travel and seek a future for their families...
...producers, subsidized by the U.S...
...Ulises Ruiz, governor of Oaxaca state, stands accused of authoritarianism and violent repression of the social movement...
...Under Mexico’s former national content laws, foreign auto“We did become part of the first world,” says Juan Manuel makers like Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and Volkswagen Sandoval, coordinator of the Permanent Seminar on Chicano were required to buy some of their components from Mexican and Border Studies at Mexico City’s National Institute of An- producers...
...notes Displaced People 1. Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, “Unauthorized Migration: An Economic Development Response,” Washington, D.C., 1990...
...What would improve our situation is real legal status for the people already here and greater availability of visas based Former Mexican president Vicente Fox boasted that in on family reunification...
...Campesinos who the impact on longshore wages and employment has been lost their land found jobs as farmworkers in California...
...It found, unsur- couldn’t find buyers for what they’d grown...
...7 He is simply restating what has ton discourse...
...Military Programs in Latin America,” September 2004, available at ciponline...
...Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en Chiapas, Balance Anual 2007,” available at www.frayba.org (translation by the author...
...His most in developing this system...
...10...
...New guest-worker programs are the heart of the cor27 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Elections in Mexico 1. Portions of this essay draw on many of the ideas I developed in collaboration with Enrique Conejero in the introduction we wrote together for a book we coedited, Democratización y globalización en América Latina (Spain: Universidad Miguel Hernández, 2005...
...Its main function is to determine the stain spite of the fact that Congress members voted for these tus of people once they’re here...
...5. Norberto Bobbio, El futuro de la democracia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), 25...
...In 2000–01, sasters that drive people to work for dollars in the U.S., to many jobs were lost on the U.S.-Mexico border, and in the replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their current recession, thousands more are being eliminated...
...would set Mexico on a course to become a first-world nation...
...Mexican Studies, 2004), 88–95...
...Legalization and more visas 2005 his country’s citizens working in the United States would resolve a lot of problems—not all, but it would sent back $18 billion...
...Juárez,” NACLA Report on the Americas 41, no...
...With the end of the Conasupo stores United States, telling audiences unhappy at high levels of immigration that passing NAFTA would reduce it by increasing the years following NAFTA’s adoption...
...are degovernment budget for social services...
...In return, Mexico non-project lending by the international financial instituhad to pledge its oil revenue to pay off foreign debt, mak- tions should be based on the implementation of satisfacing the country’s primary source of income unavailable for tory adjustment programs...
...5. Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, “Unauthorized Migration: An Economic Development Response...
...16...
...again impelled economically wrecked, dispossessed, and President George W. Bush says the purpose of U.S...
...agri- the large state sector, which employed millions of workers...
...17...
...Whether they live in workers don’t have labor rights or benefits,” Domínguez Mexico or the United States, working people need the of the FIOB charges...
...highs and lows of market demand...
...Armoring NAFTA 1. See the official Web site, www.spp.gov/myths_vs_facts.asp...
...59 (1994...
...NAFTA, drove people north...
...4. Jeanne Batalova, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Information Source, available at www.migrationinformation.org...
...If workers don’t get same things—secure jobs at a living wage, rights in their paid or they’re cheated, they can’t do anything...
...4. José Luis Calva, quoted in La Jornada, November 16, 1991...
...2. Thomas Shannon, speech to the Council on the Americas, April 3, 2008...
...NAFTA, however, prohibited laws requiring forthropology and History: “the backyard...
...Permajobs, but the country entirely...
...pendent on the cheap labor of Mexicans...
...5. See “A Primer on Plan Mexico,” available at http://americas.irc-online.org...
...devastating...
...years, at a compound annual rate of 9.4%, according to the One major objective of those reforms was the privatization of U.S...
...gan to supply their assembly lines with parts from their own It forced yellow corn grown by Mexican farmers without sub- subsidiaries, often manufactured in other countries...
...The World Bank estimates that in be a big step,” he says...
...Although there are and raids make organizing much more difficult...
...Mexico’s of economic crisis, by the deportation of Mexican laborers ports were sold off, and companies like Stevedoring Ser- back to Mexico in huge numbers...
...28 (July–December 2006): 117–58...
...The global production If employers are allowed to recruit contract labor abroad, system has grown very flexible in accommodating eco- and those workers can only stay if they are continuously nomic booms and busts...
...16...
...But not one immigration proposal in Congress been true throughout U.S...
...Today, employers and the nent legal status makes it easier and less risky to organize...
...7. Ibid., 127, 131...
...achieve the desired effect...
...If those communities stop sending workers, the combined with proposals for increased enforcement and labor supply dries up...
...23...
...Rubio, Explotados y excluidos...
...market, NAFTA, however, was not intended to relieve human Mexican workers lost jobs when the market for the output of suffering...
...6. Blanca Rubio, Explotados y excluidos (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2001), 128–29...
...13...
...To avert the sell-off of short-term bonds and a mended that “the United States should condition bilateral flood of capital to the north, U.S...
...22...
...In 2006 spreading poverty, and the lack of a Laid-off railroad workers traveled north, as their forbears program to create jobs and raise living standards, ignited had during the early 1900s, when Mexican labor built months of conflict in Oaxaca, in which strikes and demon- much of the rail network through the U.S...
...The IRCA commission report social needs, and foreign capital took control of the Mexican even acknowledged the potential for harm, noting that “efbanking system...
...Molina Ramírez, “El campo en cifras...
...org...
...Former Mexico City mayor Carlos Hank drove the city’s bus system deeply into debt, and then bought the lines in the 1990s at public auction...
...Juan Manuel strongly challenged the government in the 1950s...
...6 When Calderón says “intensive in la- claims that these excess profits are “illegal” and should be bor,” he means that millions of Mexican citizens are being returned to those who produced them...
...Alejandro Nadal, “Crisis alimentaria: ganancias para buitres,” La Jornada, May 7, 2008...
...prisingly, that the main motivation for coming Mexico couldn’t protect its own agriculture north was economic...
...contributing to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, since it Its report urged that “migrant-sending countries should closes off our ability to call for any change...
...Yet no company pays for a pro-employer program for legalization of the undocua single school or clinic, or even any taxes, in those commu- mented...
...6. International Crisis Group, “Latin American Drugs: Losing the Fight,” March 7. See the recent report by the international Civil Commission on Human 8. See Lourdes Godínez Leal, “Combating Impunity and Femicide in Ciudad 9. See Erich Moncada, “Mexico’s Military and the Murder at Zongolica (II),” 14, 2008, available at www.crisisgroup.org...
...Congressional increasingly come from indigenous communidebates over immigration policy have proceeded ties in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Gueras though those trade agreements bore no rela- rero...
...by David bacon Sthe U.S...
...These tive, but millions of people would...
...economy...
...Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and 23 23 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico ii Tthe Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) according to Sandoval, large farmers switched to other crop d n r e r o p m n r c e m o c e b y d a e r a d a h o c i x e M s 0 8 9 ess Congr when together joined formally rade negotiations and immigration policy passed were the A 1 s a result of a growin l g crisis in agricu a ltu o ral p i roduc t tio , n a , by s in 1986...
...regardless of immigration status...
...The debt-induced crash in the 1980s, before U.S...
...He is a writer and recent book is Illegal People— Press, 2008...
...Whereas California farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from mexico’s mostly Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today increasingly come from indigenous communities...
...We come to the United with an examination of the way U.S...
...In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocu- based on providing a labor supply produces two effects: mented migrants and set up huge guest-worker programs, Displacement becomes an unspoken tool for producing four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which workers, while inequality becomes official policy...
...policies and Criminalizes States to work because there’s no alternative...
...Ibid...
...La Consulta, un logro del movimiento ciudadano,” La Jornada, June 23, 2008...
...They don’t say so openly, but they are,” Domínguez concludes...
...5 As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquilareport: mexico ii Athey’ve done before...
...So-called illegal workers produce intensive in labor, which is the Mexican economy...
...There are no jobs” in these dilemmas—from adopting rational and Mexico, he says, “and NAFTA drove the price of humane immigration policies to reducing the How Globalization corn so low that it’s not economically possible fear and hostility toward migrants—must begin Creates Migration to plant a crop anymore...
...After Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari And when NAFTA pulled down customs barriers, large U.S...
...7. Claus Offe, “El dilema de la sincronía: democracia y economía de mercado en Europa Oriental,” Revista del Centro de Estudios Constitucionales no...
...See also Tania Molina Ramírez, “El campo en cifras,” in Masiosare, a supplement to La Jornada, January 12, 2003...
...If these migrants actually did go home, whole indusFelipe Calderón said during a recent visit to California, tries would collapse...
...Walls won’t stop migration, but 2006 that figure reached $25 billion.8 At the same time, decent wages and investing money in creating jobs in our the public funds that historically paid for schools and pub- countries of origin would decrease the pressure forcing us lic works increasingly leaves Mexico in debt payments to to leave home...
...The railroad union under leftist leaders Demetrio Vallejo and People were migrating from Mexico to its northern Valentín Campa had been so powerful that its strikes had neighbor long before NAFTA was negotiated...
...would cause more displacement and more migration...
...Imelda García, “Crece importación de fertilizantes,” Reforma, May 3, 2008...
...3 (May/June 2008): 31–33...
...While most attention has focused on its provi- when they couldn’t compete with U.S...
...U.S...
...Latin American Working Group, the Center for International Policy, and the Washington Office on Latin America, “Blurring the Lines: Trends in U.S...
...and a half jobs, mostly in the countryside...
...American Development Bank, remittances accounted for Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliban average of 1.19% of the gross domestic product between eral reforms is as central to immigration reform as gain1996 and 2000, and 2.14% between 2001 and 2006...
...dAvid BAcon SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Displaced People: NAFTA’s Most Important Product Salomon Sarita Sánchez and a crew of mixtec immigrants from oaxaca, mexico, on a strawberry farm in nipoma, California...
...forts should be made to ease transitional costs in human dora industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S...
...eign producers to use a certain percentage of local content in assembled products...
...made it plain he favored a similar agreement with Mexico, corporations dumped even more agricultural products on the commission made a report to the first president George the Mexican market...
...Mario Marín, governor of Puebla, was recorded discussing the apprehension and harassment of human rights defender Lydia Cacho with a Puebla industrialist allegedly connected to the pedophile rings Cacho wrote about...
...8. “México es tercer país receptor de remesas en el mundo, según Banco Mundial,” July 15, 2008, www.informador.com.mx...
...operative Economic Development, to study the causes of im- The National Popular Subsistence Company (Conasupo), migration to the United States...
...Proposals based on this three-part compromise nities...
...Debt ing legal status for undocumented immigrants...
...farm bill...
...Silvia Ribero, “Agrocombustibles: secretos y trampas del Banco Mundial,” La Jornada, July 5, 2008...
...By cultural exports to Mexico stood at $12.7 billion.2 In January the early 1990s the Mexican government had sold most of its and February 2008, huge demonstrations in Mexico sought mines to one company, Grupo México, owned by the wealthy to block the implementation of the agreement’s final chapter, Larrea family, along with a steel mill in Michoacán to the Villawhich lowered the tariff barriers on white corn and beans...
...Back home, Salinas and other treaty Maseca, monopolized tortilla production, while Wal-Mart beproponents made the same argument...
...4. Silvia Gómez Tagle, “Public Institutions and Electoral Transparency,” in Kevin Middlebrook, ed., Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico (San Diego: Center for U.S...
...By 2007, annual U.S...
...Antonio Sánchez, “Entrevista: Fernando Canales Clariond: comercio, la prioridad,” Reforma, January 22, 2003...
...As Congress debated the treaty, Salinas toured the fall, they in fact rose...
...Department of Homeland Security call for relaxing the Guest-worker programs, employer sanctions, enforcement, requirements on guest-worker visas...
...11...
...24...
...Today, displacement and inequality are deeply inSome 24 million immigrants live in the United States either as citizens or with documents, and 12 million without grained in the free market economy...
...A coalition for reform using their labor...
...One company, Grupo employment in Mexico...
...Víctor Suárez Carrera, “La economía agroalimentaria, un desastre,” La Jornada del Campo, April 8, 2008...
...The strations were met with repression by an unpopular govern- displacement of people had already grown so large by 1986 ment...
...Veracruz campesinos joined the stream of workers many years—even generations—for sustained growth to headed north...
...2. Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Community (Verso, 1992), 13...
...Desolation 1. This article is a revised, updated version of Sergio Zermeño, “Desolación en México...
...As Rufino Domínguez, former coordinator of Meanwhile, a rising tide of anti-immigrant the Indigenous Front of Binational Organiza- sentiment has demonized those migrants, leadtions (FIOB), points out, U.S...
...When de- the same thing...
...See also testimonies on the CCIODH video at cciodh.pangea.org...
...12...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 5
