How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration (long)
by David Bacon
The Nation
January 4, 2012 (This article appeared in the January 23,
2012 edition of The Nation.)
http://www.thenation.com/article/165438/how-us-policies-fueled-mexicos-great-migration
[This article was reported in partnership with The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin
Foundation. Some names of the people profiled in this
article have been changed.]
Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in
Veracruz, Mexico. "In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a
pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat," he recalls. But in
the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork
imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and
other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the
drop in prices. "Whatever I could do to make money, I did,"
Ortega explains. "But I could never make enough for us to
survive." In 1999 he came to the United States, where he
again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he
did it as a worker in the world's largest pork
slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.
His new employer? Smithfield-the same company whose imports
helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in
Mexico.
David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in
Tar Heel, recalls, "Sometimes the price of a pig was enough
to buy what we needed, but then it wasn't. Farm prices were
always going down. We couldn't pay for electricity, so we'd
just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time."
Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs
and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still
had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. "But we could
give milk to people who came asking for it. There were
people even worse off than us," he recalls.
In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family's farm in
Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold
four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough
money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who
took him across for $1,200. "I didn't really want to leave,
but I felt I had to," he remembers. "I was afraid, but our
need was so great."
He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. "I
couldn't find work for three months. I was desperate," he
says. He feared the consequences if he couldn't pay, and
took whatever work he could find until he finally reached
North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at
Smithfield's Tar Heel packinghouse. "The boys I played with
as a kid are all in the US," he says. "I'd see many of them
working in the plant."
North Carolina became the number-one US destination for
Veracruz's displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield,
and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year
fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a
high price. Asserting their rights also made them the
targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave
of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.
The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close
connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico
and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly
two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it
unleashed to become the world's largest packer and processor
of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped
Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural
residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many
eventually helping Smithfield's bottom line once again by
working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. "The free
trade agreement was the cause of our problems," Ceja says.
Smithfield Goes to Mexico-and Migrants Come Here
In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation,
partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a
huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in
Veracruz's Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime
partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in
1999.
By 2008 the Perote operation was sending close to a million
pigs to slaughter every year-85 percent to Mexico City and
the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its
location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz,
Mexico's largest port, the operation could easily receive
imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the
cost of raising hogs. NAFTA lifted the barriers on
Smithfield's ability to import feed. This gave it an
enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as US corn,
heavily subsidized by US farm bills, was much cheaper.
"After NAFTA," says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development
and Environment Institute at Tufts University, US corn "was
priced 19 percent below the cost of production."
But Smithfield didn't just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA
allowed it to import pork as well.
According to Alejandro Ram¡rez, general director of the
Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported
30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took
effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United
States, had grown more than twenty-five times, to 811,000
tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers
dropped 56 percent. US pork exports are dominated by the
largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfield's share of
this export market is significantly greater than its 27
percent share of US production.
Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. "We
lost 4,000 pig farms," Ram¡rez estimates, based on reports
received by the confederation from its members. "On Mexican
farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000
farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect
jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs
in total."
"That produces migration to the US or to Mexican cities,"
Ram¡rez charges.
Corn imports also rose, from 2 million to 10.3 million tons
from 1992 to 2008. "Small Mexican farmers got hit with a
double whammy," Wise explains. "On the one hand, competitors
were importing pork. On the other, they were producing
cheaper hogs." Smithfield was both producer and importer.
Wise estimates that this one company supplies 25 percent of
all the pork sold in Mexico.
The increases in pork and corn imports were among many
economic changes brought about by NAFTA and concurrent
neoliberal reforms to the Mexican economy, such as ending
land reform. Companies like Smithfield benefited from these
changes, but poverty increased also, especially in the
countryside.
In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank
found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in
1992-94, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 1996-98,
after NAFTA took effect-the years when Ortega and Ceja left
Mexico. This could be explained, the report said, "mainly by
the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of
agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real
agricultural prices."
By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology,
53 million Mexicans were living in poverty-half the
country's population. About 20 percent live in extreme
poverty, almost all in rural areas.
The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990,
4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States.
A decade later, that population had more than doubled to
9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About
5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7
million couldn't but came nevertheless.
As an agricultural state, Veracruz suffered from Mexico's
abandonment of two important policies, which also helped
fuel migration. First, neoliberal reforms did away with
Tabamex, a national marketing program for small tobacco
farmers. A similar program for coffee growers ended just as
world coffee prices plunged to record lows. Second, Carlos
Salinas de Gortari, the country's corrupt president, pushed
through changes to Article 27 of the Constitution in 1992,
dismantling land reform and allowing the sale of ejidos, or
common lands, as private property.
Waves of tobacco and coffee farmers sold their land because
they could no longer make a living on it. Many became
migrants. But allowing the sale of ejidos to foreigners made
it possible for Carroll Foods to buy land for its swine
sheds. Displaced farmers then went to work in those sheds at
low wages.
Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated
migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by
Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program,
creating the current H2-A program, which allows US
agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and
other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to
employment contracts. Growers in North Carolina became large
users of the program, especially through the North Carolina
Growers Association. Landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz
became migrant tobacco workers in the Carolinas.
"Many Veracruzanos came because we were offered work in the
tobacco fields, where we had experience," remembers Miguel
Huerta. "Then people who'd been contracted just stayed,
because they didn't have anything in Mexico to go back to.
After the tobacco harvest, workers spread out to other
industries."
From Huerta's perspective, "these companies are very
powerful. They can go to Mexico and bring as many employees
as they want and replace them when they want." Poverty,
though, was the real recruiter. It created, as Ceja says,
the need. "We all had to leave Veracruz because of it," he
emphasizes. "Otherwise, we wouldn't do something so hard."
Exporting the Hazards of Corporate Hog Raising
Hog raising is a dirty business-and the environmental damage
it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfield's
operations within US borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal
judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution
fine to that date - $12.6 million-on the company for dumping
pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into
Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went
further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new
open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its
Tar Heel plant. In 2000 then-State Attorney General Mike
Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina
State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste
that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North
Carolina's well-known hostility to regulating business, in
2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium
permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and
flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the
North Carolina Pork Council, supported it.
In Mexico's Perote Valley, however-a high, arid, volcano-
rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and Puebla-
Smithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental
restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the
United States. Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA
supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement,
but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield
under NAFTA's environmental side agreement. Carolina
Ramirez, who heads the women's department of the Veracruz
Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that "the
company can do here what it can't do at home."
For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was
devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up
and vomit from the smell. He'd put his wife, two sons and
daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they'd drive away from
his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then
he'd park, and they'd sleep in the truck for the rest of the
night.
Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments for
three years. He says they kept taking medicine until finally
a doctor told them to stop drinking water from the farm's
well. Last May they began hauling in bottled water. Once
they stopped drinking from the well, the infections stopped.
Less than half a mile from his house is one of the many pig
farms built by Smithfield's Mexican hog-raising subsidiary,
GCM. "Before the pig farms came, they said they would bring
jobs," Limon remembers. "But then we found out the reality.
Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of
contamination."
David Torres, a Perote native who spent eight years in the
operation's maternity section, estimates that GCM has eighty
complexes, each with as many as 20,000 hogs. The sheds look
clean and modern. "When I went to work there, I could see
the company was completely mechanized," he says. The Mexican
News online business journal explains that "production cost
is very low because of the high ratio of pigs to workers.
The preparation of food and feeding of the pigs is
completely automated, along with temperature control and the
elimination of excrement."
Workers aren't employed directly by Granjas Carroll,
however, according to Torres. "Since we work for a
contractor, we're not entitled to profit-sharing or company
benefits," he says. "Granjas Carroll made millions of
dollars in profits, but never distributed a part of them to
the workers," as required under Mexico's federal labor law.
Torres was paid 1,250 pesos ($90) every fifteen days; he
says the company picked him up at 6 every morning and
returned him home at 5:30 each evening, often six days a
week.
In back of each complex is a large oxidation pond for the
hogs' urine and excrement. A recent drive through the valley
revealed that only one of several dozen was covered.
"Granjas Carroll doesn't use concrete or membranes under
their ponds," Torres charges, "so the water table is getting
contaminated. People here get their water from wells, which
are surrounded by pig farms and oxidation ponds." Ruben
Lopez, a land commissioner in Chichicuautla, a valley town
surrounded by hog farms, also says there is no membrane
beneath the pools.
In response to an article published in August in Imagen de
Veracruz, a Veracruz newspaper, GCM public relations
director Tito Tablada Cort,s declared, "Granjas Carroll does
not pollute." And Smithfield spokeswoman Amy Richards says,
"Our environmental treatment systems in Mexico strictly
comply with local and federal regulations. Mexico
encourages, and requires, anaerobic digesters and
evaporation ponds."
Yet despite the 1,200 jobs the pig farms created in a valley
where employment is scarce, Limon estimates that a third of
the young people have left. "They don't see a future, and
every year it's harder to live here," he says.
In 2004 a coalition of local farmers called Pueblos Unidos
(United Towns) started collecting signatures for a petition
to protest the expansion of the swine sheds. According to
teacher Veronica Hernandez, students told her that going to
school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. "Some of them
fainted or got headaches," she charges.
When expansion plans moved forward nonetheless, on April 26,
2005, hundreds of people blocked the main highway. That
November a construction crew about to build another shed and
oxidation pond was met by 1,000 angry farmers. Police had to
rescue the crew. Finally, in 2007 GCM's Tablada Cort,s
signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new
expansion. That year, however, the company filed criminal
complaints against Hernandez and thirteen other leaders,
charging them with "defaming" the company. Although the
charges were eventually dropped, the farmers were
intimidated and the protest movement diminished.
Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu,
the AH1N1 virus, was found in a 5-year-old boy, _dgar
Hern ndez from La Gloria. Pickup trucks from the local
health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to
kill the omnipresent flies. Nevertheless, the virus spread
to Mexico City. By May, forty-five people in Mexico had
died. Schools closed, and public events were canceled.
Smithfield denied that the virus came from its Veracruz
hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. Tablada's
note to Imagen de Veracruz asserted, "Our company has been
totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus," and "the
official position of the Secretary of Health and the World
Health Organization leaves no room for doubt." By one
estimate, fear of the virus had led to losses of $8.4
million per day for the US pork industry for the first two
weeks of the global scare. So meatpacking companies breathed
a sigh of relief at Smithfield's exoneration. In the valley,
though, "no one believed it," Limon recalls.
This past August, GCM representatives received a permit from
the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the county
next to Perote, for building new hog farms. Representatives
of eighteen town councils have denounced the expansion plans
and accuse state authorities of "threatening to use public
force (the granaderos) so that the company can continue to
expand, against our will."
"It doesn't do any good to threaten to kill us," responds
one farmer. "We're not going to let them build any more
sheds. We want GCM to leave the valley."
Veracruzanos Fight for the Union in Tar Heel
As unrest grew in Veracruz, it was also growing among the
company's workers in North Carolina. When the Tar Heel
slaughterhouse opened in 1992, its labor force was made up
mostly of African-Americans and local Lumbee Native
Americans. Many objected to the high line speed and the
injuries that proliferated as a result. The plant kills and
dismembers 32,000 hogs every day. People stand very close
together as animal carcasses speed by. They wield extremely
sharp knives, slicing through sinews and bone in the same
motion, hundreds of times each hour. Repetitive stress and
other injuries are endemic to meatpacking, and the faster
the line runs, the more injuries there are.
The workers' frustration with the low wages and brutal
working conditions produced one of the longest and bitterest
fights to organize a union in modern US labor history. In
1994 and 1997 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
lost two union representation elections. The 1997 election
was thrown out by the labor board, but an administrative law
judge ruled that in both, Smithfield "engaged in egregious
and pervasive unfair labor practices and objectionable
conduct." In 1997 police in riot gear lined the walkway into
the plant, and workers had to file past them to cast their
ballots. At the end of the vote count, union organizer Ray
Shawn was beaten up. Security chief Danny Priest and the
other guards were later deputized, and Smithfield maintained
a holding cell in a trailer on the property, which workers
called the company jail.
Even by standards in North Carolina, where union membership
and wages are low, Smithfield's pay scale and reputation for
injuries made it hard for the company to attract local
workers. In the mid-'90s, Mexicans pushed by the effects of
NAFTA to leave the Veracruz countryside began arriving in
North Carolina and going to work at the Tar Heel
slaughterhouse. All over Veracruz, meatpacking companies
were recruiting them, according to Carolina Ramirez. "There
were recruiters in many Veracruz towns," she remembers.
"There were even vans stationed in different places, and a
whole system in which people were promised jobs in the
packing plants. It was an open secret." Richards, the
Smithfield spokeswoman, denied that the company recruited
workers in Mexico. "With one exception [a management trainee
program], Smithfield Foods does not travel to, nor advertise
in, other countries or outside of our local communities to
actively recruit employees for our various facilities around
the country," she said.
Roberto Ortega remembers that there were hundreds of people
from Veracruz in the Tar Heel plant when he worked there in
the late '90s and early 2000s. They'd have community get-
togethers, eat seafood and play their state's famous jarocho
music on wooden harps and guitars. "Almost the whole town
[of Las Choapas] is here," he says. "Some are supervisors
and mayordomos, and they bring people from the town."
As new migrants, the Veracruzanos were desperate and hungry.
Most were undocumented. According to Keith Ludlum, one of
the plant's few white workers, "After Smithfield ran through
the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more
immigrants working in the plant. The company thought the
undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn't
complain."
Ramirez describes the Veracruz immigrants as "docile at
first, because they didn't have the experience." For
employers, she explains, "these people were a safe
workforce. They didn't understand their rights, but they got
the message-don't organize. They would work fast for fear of
losing their jobs, because there was no alternative."
"They pressured you so you'd work faster and produce more,"
Ortega recalls. "You felt like knifing the foreman. Many
wanted to throw their knives at his feet and just leave. But
if you are the support of your family, you put up with it. I
am not going to leave my work, you'd say to yourself-who
will pay me then?"
Eventually, however, like the locals, the immigrants didn't
put up with it either.
In the early 2000s the UFCW sent in a new group of
organizers, who began helping workers find tactics to slow
down the lines. They set up a workers' center in Red
Springs, offering English classes after work. In 2003 the
night cleaning crew refused to work, keeping the lines from
starting the following morning. David Ceja helped organize
another work stoppage a year later.
Ortega was fired in 2005. "Perhaps they saw us talking about
this [the union] on our meal breaks, and they started to
notice there is something going on with these people," he
says. "They never told me and I never knew why I was fired.
They just said, As of today there is no more work for you."
He then began making visits to other workers.
By 2006 Mexicans made up about 60 percent of the plant's
5,000 employees. In April of that year, protests and
demonstrations for immigrants' rights were spreading across
the country, culminating in massive May Day rallies in
dozens of cities. Hundreds left the Tar Heel plant and
marched through the streets of Wilmington. On May Day only a
skeleton crew showed up for work.
That spring, Smithfield enrolled in the Department of
Homeland Security's IMAGE program, in which the government
identifies undocumented workers and employers agree to fire
them. The program enforces a provision of the 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act called employer
sanctions, which prohibits employers from hiring
undocumented workers. Smithfield spokeswoman Richards says,
"We do all that the law requires, and more, in assuring that
our workforce is authorized to work in the US."
In October 2006 the company announced that it intended to
fire hundreds of workers suspected of being undocumented
because they had bad Social Security numbers. When
terminations started, 300 workers walked out and stopped
production, temporarily forcing the company to rescind the
firings.
Ludlum, who had just been rehired after a twelve-year legal
battle, says, "It was really empowering to see all those
workers stand up together-probably one of the best
experiences of my life." It had an effect on African-
American workers too. They collected 4,000 signatures,
asking the company for the day off on Martin Luther King
Jr.'s birthday. When managers refused, 400 black workers on
the kill line didn't come in. With no hogs on the hooks at
the beginning of the lines, no one else could work either.
The plant shut down again.
Nine days later, agents of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) detained twenty-one Smithfield workers for
deportation, questioning hundreds more in the lunchroom.
Fear was so intense that most immigrants didn't show up for
work the following day. A few months later, another raid
took place. Some of the detained workers were later charged
with federal felonies for using bad Social Security numbers.
Meanwhile, ICE agents swept through Mexican communities,
detaining people at home and in the street. Ludlum and union
organizer Eduardo Pea followed the ICE agents with video
cameras but couldn't stop the raids. Ludlum, Pea and other
union activists believed the company had cooperated in the
immigration enforcement because the Veracruzanos were no
longer useful. "The workforce that was in the shadows was
expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community,"
Ludlum says. "That's not what the company wanted."
Eventually, the crackdown took its toll, and the immigrant
workforce shrank by half, as people left. Union organizing
stalled. But then, in 2006, led by activist Terry Slaughter,
African-American workers stopped the plant again by sitting
all day in the middle of the kill floor. They put union
stickers on their hard hats and began collecting signatures
demanding union recognition. Spurred by widespread community
support and the threat of lawsuits, the company agreed to an
election without its old bare-knuckle tactics. When the
ballots were finally counted on December 11 that year, the
union had won. Today Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208,
and Slaughter is secretary-treasurer.
A Veracruzana, Carmen Izquierdo, sits on the union executive
board. "In the union it doesn't matter if you're
undocumented, if you have papers or not," she says. "All the
workers here, whether or not we have papers, have rights."
Ludlum and Slaughter say line speed is slower now, and
workers can rotate from one job to another, reducing
injuries. Ceja feels that the union gave workers a tool to
change conditions. "I'm glad it came in. We worked hard to
get it," he says. But he was not there to enjoy the union's
victory; he left after he was made a supervisor at the time
of the raids. "They wanted me to send workers to the office,
where I was afraid the immigration agents would be waiting
for them," he explains. "I thought it was better for me to
leave, so I wouldn't have to turn in my compaeros."
Others left because of fear, especially in the intensifying
anti-immigrant climate in North Carolina. Roberto Ortega and
his wife, Maria, left the state when the hostility got worse
and they couldn't find work. Juvencio Rocha, head of the
Network of Veracruzanos in North Carolina, says bitterly
that "after we contributed to the economy, they didn't want
us here anymore. They even took our driver's licenses away."
Resisting the System on Both Sides of the Border
Smithfield didn't invent the system of displacement and
migration. It took advantage of US trade and immigration
policies, and of economic reforms in Mexico. In both
countries, however, the company was forced to bend at least
slightly in the face of popular resistance. Farmers in
Perote Valley have been able to stop swine shed expansion,
at least for a while. Migrant Veracruzanos helped organize a
union in Tar Heel. Yet these were defensive battles against
a system that needs the land and labor of workers but does
its best to keep them powerless.
"From the beginning NAFTA was an instrument of
displacement," says Juan Manuel Sandoval, co-founder of the
Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade. "The penetration
of capital led to the destruction of the traditional
economy, especially in agriculture. People had no
alternative but to migrate." Sandoval notes that many US
industries are dependent on this army of available labor.
"Meatpacking especially depends on a constant flow of
workers," he says. "Mexico has become its labor reserve."
Raul Delgado Wise, a professor at the University of
Zacatecas, charges that "rather than a free-trade agreement,
NAFTA can be described as a mechanism for the provision of
cheap labor. Since NAFTA came into force, the migrant
factory has exported [millions of] Mexicans to the United
States."
About 11 percent of Mexico's population lives in the United
States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their
remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when
NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then $20
billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico.
Even in the recession, Mexicans sent home $21.13 billion in
2010. Remittances total 3 percent of Mexico's gross domestic
product, according to Frank Holmes, investment analyst and
CEO of US Global Investors. They are now Mexico's second-
largest source of national income, behind oil.
However, Mexico's debt payments, mostly to US banks, consume
the same percentage of the GDP as remittances. Those
remittances, therefore, support families and provide
services that were formerly the obligation of the Mexican
government. This alone gives the government a vested
interest in the continuing labor flow.
For Fausto Limon, the situation is stark: his family's right
to stay in Mexico, on his ranch in the Perote Valley,
depends on ending the problems caused by the operation of
Granjas Carroll. But he has no money for planting, and he
shares the poverty created by meat and corn dumping with
farmers throughout Mexico. The trade system that allows this
situation to continue will inevitably produce more migrants-
if not Limon, then probably his children. The fabric of
sustainable rural life at his Rancho del Riego is being
pulled apart.
In both the United States and Mexico, many migrant rights
networks believe that rational immigration reform must
address issues far beyond immigration law enforcement in the
United States: real reform must change the US trade policies
that contribute to displacing people. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado,
a professor at UCLA and former head of the Binational Front
of Indigenous Organizations, a group of indigenous Oaxacans
living in Mexico and the United States, believes that in the
United States "migrants need the right to work, but with
labor rights and benefits." In Mexico, "we need development
that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity-the
right to not migrate. Both rights are part of the same
solution."
There are some constructive proposals on the table. The
TRADE Act, proposed in the 110th Congress by Maine
Democratic Representative Mike Michaud, received support
from many migrant rights groups because it would hold
hearings to re-examine the impact of NAFTA, including
provisions like the environmental side agreement that did
nothing to restrict the impact of Granjas Carroll on Perote
Valley. Another immigration reform proposal, called the
Dignity Campaign, goes one step further. It would ban
agreements that lead to displacement, like that caused by
pork imports or the cross-border investments that created
the Perote pig farms. It would also repeal employer
sanctions, the immigration law that led to the firing of so
many Veracruz migrants at the Tar Heel plant.
"Employer sanctions have little effect on migration," says
Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San
Francisco, "but they have made workers more vulnerable to
employer pressure. The rationale has always been that this
kind of enforcement will dry up jobs for the undocumented
and discourage them from coming. However, they actually
become more desperate and take jobs at lower wages-in
effect, a subsidy to employers."
"When you make someone's status even more illegal," Carolina
Ramirez adds, "you just make their living and working
conditions worse. Jobs become like slavery. And if there are
no remittances, kids in Veracruz can't go to school or to
the doctor. All the social problems we already have get
worse. And all this just provokes more migration."
The Dignity Campaign and similar proposals are not viable in
a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations
seeking guest-worker programs. But as it took a civil rights
movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to
establish the rights of immigrants will also require a
social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.
The walkouts in Smithfield and the marches in the streets in
2006 show a deep desire among migrants for basic changes in
their conditions and rights. In Perote Valley, farmers are
equally determined to prevent the expansion of pig farms and
the destruction of their environment. These organizing
efforts are linked not just because they're carried on by
people from the same state, facing the same transnational
corporation. They're trying to change the same system.
"We are fighting because we are being destroyed," says
Roberto Ortega. "That is the reason for the daily fight, to
try to change this."
[David Bacon, a former union organizer and a fellow at the
Oakland Institute, is the author of Illegal People and the
forthcoming The Right to Not Migrate (both by Beacon).]
===
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the
US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press,
2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=
4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
=====
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