magellan01, we meet again. 
This is the first time in a while I’ve dared to set foot in GD, as I have no formal debate skills whatsoever. So if I mess up, realize I’m not intentionally being an idiot.
I think I see what you’re getting at here. Is there some sort of formally recognized definition of ‘‘human rights’’? What are they and whose standards? Because this is an issue that has always, to me, seemed to be entirely subjective. You are saying that everyone has the right to strive for a better position, but that nobody has the right to expect that position to be guaranteed? Is this based on any standardized perspective on human rights, or just your own? (genuinely curious.)
I guess I will try to go from there.
Oh, believe me, I do rethink that all the time. When I first started studying this issue seriously, I had a very one-dimensional perspective–the very very liberal, very pro-immigration, anti Free-Trade, anti-capitalist perspective. Then I wrote a research paper on NAFTA’s impact on Mexico, which limbered up my position a bit-- and finally I spent some time living in Mexico and talking to people to try to get to the bottom of it all.
I am now very confused.
One thing I can confirm from my studies and anecdotally-- Mr. Moto’s assertion that emigration has crippled Mexico’s development as a nation. I cannot stress enough how dependent Mexico is on the U.S. The vast majority of the people I spoke with have no concept of the idea of ‘‘Mexico’s future as a nation.’’ It is about the ‘‘future of my family’’, and in most cases it involves learning English and moving to the U.S. (or Canada.) In the state where I lived, 25% of the people had lived in the U.S. in the previous three months. In the farming community where I lived, 90% of the original community members didn’t even live there anymore. I’m talking abandoned houses all around–most living (legally, I might add) in the United States, and paying annual or biannual visits to their hometown.
This has had a severely detrimental effect on Mexico overall. It has created a labor/land vacuum that drug dealers have not hesitated to exploit. Where Mexico’s government has failed to create structure, drug traffickers have. There are entire communities dependent on the drug trade to handle issues like housing, medical care, and other public services that the Mexican government has failed to provide. There is an all-out dirty war being fought between the *narcotraficantes *and the police officials, most of which are corrupt.
Why so much immigration? It is not as simple as ‘‘Free Trade destroyed Mexico’’ by any means. But there is a very clear correlation between the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986 and serious economic change in Mexico. The agricultural sector suffered, and has been suffering ever since. Work shifted from the agricultural sector in southern Mexico to the maquinas (foreign-owned factories) of the north. The majority of these are along the border to allow easy transport of goods from the U.S., tax and subsidy free. Basically all they provide is labor, because all materials are imported in, and all products are exported out. These factories offer no real economic growth for Mexico.
Urban Mexicans tend to argue that the agricultural sector could hardly offer economic growth either–and there may be a great deal of truth to that. I don’t have any answers about what’s ‘‘best’’ for Mexico, other than, ‘‘actual honest to god investment by Mexicans that employs Mexicans.’’ And maybe a little old fashioned American capitalism.
What is comes down to is this: If a Mexican farmer is out of work because of the suffering agricultural sector, he does one of two things:
- packs his bags for the big city to work in the maquinas
- packs his bags for the U.S.
In the U.S. he is going to make 10x more money for doing the same work. It’s not surprising which choice he usually opts for. Concepts like ‘‘illegality’’ are moot to a desperate Mexican. They don’t regard or trust their own government (for very good reason), so it’s less likely they’ll regard or trust the U.S. government and its laws. They just want money to feed their families.
I don’t think people really grasp how severe of a problem this U.S. undercutting of Mexican goods is. It really sunk in for me when I was doing my reading for class one day–reading about a community of 18,000 people who live in the dumps of Mexico city. These people are about as low on the social meter as you can get–they live in homes built into dump heaps like little caves, and they scavenge for garbage to sell.
And one women commented, ‘‘Now they are importing the salvaged garbage from the U.S. and selling it for cheaper. We can’t compete.’’
For garbage. They can’t compete with the U.S. garbage salvaging industry.
I don’t know. I enjoy working in the community and I love speaking Spanish and studying Mexican culture. I was born to do this work. Am I supposed to ask every person their legality status before I agree to help them? What else am I supposed to do?
Ideally I’d like to tackle the issue on both fronts–do community work AND research at the same time? I believe the research will go a lot farther toward actually finding a solution to the problem–but most people who have a hard and immobile opinion on this matter really have no clue what Mexico is up against. From an outside observer’s standpoint, it almost seems like a cultural instinct to fail as a nation.*
*So this doesn’t seem like I completely pulled it out of my ass–my husband commented that cultures with higher interdependence tend to have higher corruption. This is because the family is the first priority, perhaps transcending the value of fairness and equality? Just a thought.
This is a huge concern of mine. How can we find the resources to take care of more people if we can’t take care of the ones we already have? There is a lot of social inequality in the U.S., and I think that illegal immigration places an especially heavy burden on poor black Americans, who are already marginalized. It also creates a lot of racial hostility between blacks and Mexicans, because they perceive their job security is being threatened.
I am not actually convinced that slews of people go jobless because of Mexican immigration, but I am convinced that illegal immigration is taxing an already overburdened health system, and people who pay for it the most are poor black Americans and other legal minorities with a low SES.
So yes, I clearly have a dilemma here, in that I believe working in the trenches, in this case, is tantamount to placing a band-aid on a broader social issue–treating the symptom, not the cause. But people have individual merit to me, and I personally cannot deny the individual on this basis.
So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I am both an academic and a humanitarian, and I’m in a clear conflict of interest. I just wanted you to know, it’s always on my mind. It haunts me.