In pursuit of the American dream
Written by Laura Carlsen
Wednesday, 29 March 2006
Bad Blood on the Border
Guillermo Martinez was only 20 years old when he was shot in the back at close range by an agent of the U.S. Border Patrol in the state of California on December 30, 2005. Scores of migrants have been shot by U.S. immigration enforcement officers. Most fail to make the headlines. But Martinez's death comes at the same time as a series of measures to further criminalize migrants—measures that are likely to increase the chances that more young men and women lose their lives on what has become the world's most contradictory border. House Bill 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner bill after its sponsor, was passed in the lower house last December. The bill calls for making illegal entry into the United States a felony, building approximately 700 miles of fence to staunch the flow of immigrants, and beefing up border security.
Both the title—"The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Control Act"—and the logic of the law locate immigration squarely within the purview of the war against terrorism. But using an anti-terrorism lens on immigration issues obscures a much different reality.
Seeking Survival
The immigration phenomenon is really a question of labor flows. When the United States, Canada, and Mexico entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) they created an instrument to facilitate the crossborder movement of money and goods but ignored the third ingredient of production: human beings. Many of the transformations of the Mexican economy wrought by NAFTA — including a reduction in subsistence "non-competitive" farming to the tune of two million displaced farmers, the loss of small and medium-sized national industry, and greater inequality in income distribution — have fed the boom in out-migration. High unemployment, or in the case of Mexico, underemployment since the lack of unemployment benefits means everyone does something even if it's only washing windshields at stoplights, leads increasing numbers to seek gainful employment in the relatively high-wage north.
Their employment in the U.S. economy is a form of outsourcing within national boundaries. They work as a sub-layer of the labor force that earns less, has fewer benefits, and enjoys almost no legal protection under laws that refuse to recognize their very existence.
For better or for worse, the U.S. economy depends on immigrant labor. Just weeks after Martinez was shot, Arizona's governor announced a proposal to import 25,000 legal day-workers from the neighboring state of Sonora to harvest the state's winter crops. In addition to agriculture, the services sector throughout the country also harbors a growing dependence on immigrant labor.
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