Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico

[Tom Joad]

i suspect Trump will do more to solve the problem of illegal immigration with his trade polices than he will by building his wall. And that will be a good thing.

http://www.politicalresearch.org/201....XtbBeTVy.dpbs

NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising incomes and employment in Mexico, and did not decrease the flow of migrants. Instead, it became a source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate. The treaty forced corn grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico’s own market with corn from huge U.S. producers, who had been subsidized by the U.S. Agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion annually. Corn imports rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008. Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect. By 2010, pork imports, almost all from the U.S., had grown over 25 times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56%.8

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, “We lost 4,000 pig farms. Each 100 animals produce 5 jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the 5 indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total. This produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities—a big problem for our country.”9 Once Mexican meat and corn producers were driven from the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to price changes dictated by U.S. agribusiness or U.S. policy. “When the U.S. modified its corn policy to encourage ethanol production,” he charges, “corn prices jumped 100% in one year.”10

NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products for what it cost to produce them. Mexico couldn’t protect its own agriculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped government might have bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat, or provided subsidies for other crops.

But once free-market structures were in place prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Campesinos from Veracruz, as well as Oaxaca and other major corn-producing states, joined the stream of workers headed north.11 There, they became an important part of the workforce in U.S. slaughterhouses and other industries.

[sheltiedave]

TJ, using David Bacon as your main fact provider is a losing proposition from the start. The vast majority of his footnotes are from his own publications.

Mexico, just like the US, has close to 50% of its working population at or below the poverty line. Just like the US, whenever the economy takes a downturn, it forces workers to become transitory, and to uproot to where jobs can be found.

First the dispossessed will travel to Mexico City. If there are no jobs or cousins to help there, then they travel to the skirt factory cities that ring the border. If there are no jobs there, then they migrate north of the border for migrant jobs here in the states. This has been the pattern for over 100 years, and it neither started with, nor was greatly influenced by, NAFTA.

Globalization is an end result of capitalism, as producers seek economies of scale utilizing the cheapest resources and labor pools they can find that are reasonably supported by transportation, electricity, water, and technical skills.
Locking Mexico into a nationalist substenance agrarian economy may provide for a more stable economic cycle, but it would require a political structure similar to North Korea. It will never happen.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by sheltiedave

TJ, using David Bacon as your main fact provider is a losing proposition from the start.

So?

I can go to google and find a shitload of sources that will say the same thing. And eventually I'll find some that you can't discredit.

But I'm not going to play Dueling Banjos with you.

NAFTA is a big corporate scheme designed primarily to make rich people richer and poor people poorer.

That's my story and I'm stickin to it.

[CarlV]

In case you are not interested in alternative facts...

More Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. than are coming into the country.

While tougher enforcement of immigration laws has been a significant factor in the reversal, most of the departing Mexicans are leaving on their own, a Pew Research Center report said Thursday.

Citing Mexican census figures, the report found that 1 million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S. for Mexico from 2009 to 2014. It said that U.S. census data for the same period shows an estimated 870,000 Mexicans entered the U.S.

Pew's findings accounted for both documented and undocumented immigrants.

Among the most common reasons Mexicans are saying adiós to the USA are a slow economic recovery here and the fact that they miss their families back home, the study found.

In the past it was easier for immigrants to visit their families and return to the U.S. But with increased border enforcement, they remain in the U.S. until family ties pull them back home, said Ana Gonzalez the author of the report.

Another factor that may be discouraging northern migration is tougher enforcement of immigration laws at the border and inside the U.S.

"U.S. border apprehensions of Mexicans have fallen sharply, to just 230,000 in fiscal year 2014 -- a level not seen since 1971," the report said.

The number of Mexicans deported through heightened ICE enforcement has spiked. The Obama administration has deported more Mexicans than any other president.

Despite the deportations, the majority of Mexicans who returned to Mexico between 2009 and 2014 have done it of their own volition. The Pew study found that only 14% of those who returned to Mexico in that time period did so because they'd been deported.

While a majority of Mexicans living in Mexico still believe that life is better north of the border, a growing proportion is less impressed with the American Dream.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/19/news...s-than-coming/

Carl

[Rajoo]

Since the aftermath of 9/11 and the formation of DHS, it is now almost impossible to get a job in the US if you don't have the proper work permits. In fact in some states they cannot even get drivers licenses.
Ones that can find under the table cash paying jobs can survive. So it is not surprising that people are looking to go back.

[sheltiedave]

TJ, in case you haven't noticed, there are a bunch of us here who want to see a vibrant middle class, and a lower class that has mobility into the middle class.

That is why we didn't want to see billionaires running the government. You are the one who convinced yourself the best way to short circuit the system when your fab boy lost, was to switch sides and run with Trumpinista. Now you are his numero uno henchman here, due to some perverse electrical thinking synapses.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by Rajoo

In fact in some states they cannot even get drivers licenses.

OMG!

You mean there are some places where someone here illegally can't get a drivers license?

Gee, what the Fuck is wrong with this country!?

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by sheltiedave

TJ, in case you haven't noticed, there are a bunch of us here who want to see a vibrant middle class, and a lower class that has mobility into the middle class.

That is why we didn't want to see billionaires running the government. You are the one who convinced yourself the best way to short circuit the system when your fab boy lost, was to switch sides and run with Trumpinista. Now you are his numero uno henchman here, due to some perverse electrical thinking synapses.

It's not perverse. It's logical. I'm way smarter than most people, and I see things they can't.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by sheltiedave

That is why we didn't want to see billionaires running the government.

Sure, but the Clinton's $100 million was fine with you.

And who do you think was pulling Clinton's strings?

[JCricket]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

It's not perverse. It's logical. I'm way smarter than most people, and I see things they can't.

Tom,
Thanks for making this clear to us.