By Steve Max

There is no immigration problem. There is a labor problem, a worker problem, a jobs and wages problem. There is nothing that is being said about immigrant workers today that wasn’t being said about native-born American workers until only a few decades ago. “Black people coming up from the South will take your job.” “Okies will take your job.” “Hillbillies will come to Cincinnati and take your job.” Does anyone remember, “Women will take your job”? That was what the right wing said.

The labor problem is international. What the United States is doing, in effect, is squeezing a toothpaste tube at one end while it tightens the cap at the other end. American trade policy, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is increasing poverty in Mexico, as are similar agreements throughout Latin America. Poverty is forcing people to leave their own countries, hometowns, families and friends and come here, not because we are such nice folks, but just to survive. The American response is to build a wall.

NAFTA, by permitting heavily subsidized, low priced imports of U.S. corn and other agricultural products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land. Some two million (as of 2006) Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture. Many of those who remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those who cross the border to feed their families. Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50 percent. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their “death warrant.”

NAFTA’s service-sector rules allow big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.

Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25 percent since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An oversupply of workers, combined with the government policy of crushing union organizing drives, has resulted in sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

Taking the profit out of exploiting immigrant labor

In addition to restructuring trade agreements, the U.S. must take the profit out of the exploitation of immigrant labor in order to protect both immigrants and the low-wage American labor with which immigrant labor competes for jobs. This means:

• Raising the minimum wage
• Strictly enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act and OSHA
• Reforming labor law to promote union organization
• Equalizing benefits through mandated vacation time and national health care such as now exists in all other western industrial countries
• Applying all of the above to U.S.-born, documented, and undocumented workers equally.

If Americans want to eliminate the negative social and economic impacts of impoverished immigrants, this is the only way to do so. We must remember that each generation fears immigrants for one fabricated reason or another; we always seem to forget that so many of our forbears once were impoverished immigrants too.

This article originally appeared in the Three Parks Independent Democrats newsletter.