NAFTA, Immigrants and the Discussion That is Not Happening

What is critical for us to grasp on this side of the Rio Grande River is that NAFTA has had a devastating impact on the Mexican economy. Through forcing the Mexican farmer to compete with USA farmers, rural Mexico’s economy has been turned upside down. The reality is that the Mexican farmer has been unable to compete, and as a result there began – in the mid 1990s – a migration of rural Mexicans into the larger Mexican cities. Finding few job opportunities, the migration moved north toward the USA. This was accompanied by the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican public sector, which also suffered severe body blows, thereby undermining what little social safety net the people of Mexico had.

I thought a great deal about this recently when I was moderating a debate on immigration within a labor union. The vehemence of some of the anti-immigrant speakers, including – and very unfortunately – an African American woman, was not only deeply unsettling, but equally lacking in any historical context. While the focus of the anti-immigrant speakers was allegedly undocumented immigrants in general, there was nothing in their language that indicated that they were thinking about Irish, Poles, Russians, or anyone other than Latinos, and most particularly, Mexicans. When confronted with this question of NAFTA they had nothing to say. Interestingly, they could also not explain why they had nothing to say about any other ethnic undocumented worker besides Latinos.