The Effects of NAFTA on Illegal Mexican Immigration

The Effects of NAFTA on Illegal Immigration from Mexico

By Gil Villagrán, MSW El Observador, San Jose December 7, 2007
gvillagran [at] casa.sjsu.edu


In 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement allowed money and products (but not workers), to cross the border, without protective tariffs, the dynamics of trade between Mexico and the U.S. changed dramatically. U.S. corporations immediately took advantage of the labor costs in Mexico, often one-tenth the costs in the U.S., and with practically no limits on factory pollution, and minimal safety regulations or employee rights. Corporations exploited the agreement to maximize profits at cost to workers on both sides of the border.

The case of a light bulb manufacturer illustrates the point: Indiana workers with union jobs were paid from $ 8-25 per hour, but NAFTA enabled the factory to move to Mexico--paying workers $ 6 per day!--then export the product, with eliminated tariffs, back into the U.S. with 300 million consumers needing light bulbs. What of the Indiana workers? Some went to Mexico to train their replacements, the majority were laid off. The savings to the corporation were so high, soaring profits paid the CEO a multi-hundred million dollar bonus, and completely purchased the NBC TV network.

The runaway factories built at every border-town just South of the Mexican border, called maquiladoras, lure desperate workers from all over Mexico and Central America. While some workers moved North from other manufacturing jobs, most are displaced farmers from their ancestral lands, displaced by a complementary dynamic of NAFTA. As anyone who eats Mexican food knows, there is not a meal without corn tortillas, tamales, atole, etc. Corn was the primary food of ancient Latin America and is now the number one food source in the world. American agra business, using herbicides, pesticides, irrigation, fertilizers, mechanical harvesters, and recent bio-engineering, overwhelms Mexican corn production. In addition, taxpayer agricultural subsidies, $50 billion in ten years, enable U.S. corn to flood Mexico, with a 525% increase in exports the first year of NAFTA, selling cheaper than locally grown corn, leaving millions of Mexican corn farmers with nowhere to sell their corn. Desperate to feed their families, they in turn flooded the maquiladoras at the border cities, taking any job at any wage.

Following the iron dictates of capitalism, additional desperate workers reduced wages to the current $ 7 per day. Yet "market forces" (and other U.S. trade agreements) opened still lower cost manufacturing in Asia, such as $.18 at a Nike factory in Vietnam, $.27 at an I-Pod factory in Hong Kong, with these goods flooding the U.S. without tariffs. Many Mexican maquiladoras, now "too costly" to operate after 14 years, are moving to Asia, with two billion workers, just as desperate for any job at any wage under any deplorable conditions.

So what is happening to the laid off Mexican maquiladora workers? Their choice is to go back to their abandoned corn fields without hope to make any living at all or cross the border into the United States illegally--since resident work visas are not given to low skilled, yet hardworking, impoverished workers. It is estimated that of the 14 million undocumented, so-called "illegal aliens" in our nation, ten million are refugees of NAFTA, coming from Mexico since the passage of NAFTA, and this is before much of the expected reduction of maquiladora jobs! Crossing the brutally inhospitable border, with potential death from heat or cold exhaustion, poisonous snakes and scorpions, gun totting bandits, vigilantes and border patrol requires a very determined person to take such risks for low pay menial jobs on this side of the border. Why would anyone take such a risk? Ask any day laborer standing at a hardware store. You will hear: "Pues to tenia otra para darle de comer a mi familia... I had no other option to feed my family!"