By David Schmidt - Creating Alternative and Fair Enterprise (C.A.F.E.)
Comedian Dave Chappelle featured
a skit once in which he played the President of the United States. In response
to the problem of millions of Americans without health insurance, Chapelle’s
character offered a simple solution: since Canada offers universal health care
to its citizens, he proposed Canadian identification cards for all US citizens.
Americans could receive their medical treatment in Canada, free of charge!
Many people view immigration to
the United States in similar terms. “Why do they have to come and use our
resources, take our jobs, deplete our public services? Why don’t they just fix
their own country?” Immigration reform is often couched in similar terms:
legalizing undocumented immigrants is described as “amnesty”, which is, by
definition, forgiving a crime that has been committed. Immigrants’ rights are
often described as charity for people who have “stolen” something or “entered
illegally”.
The irony of the situation is
that, in many cases, massive immigration to a particular country takes place
precisely because of that country’s military, political and economic
intervention in the nation sending the immigrants. The British Empire of the 19th
Century drained many of its colonies of their resources—people now leave India
and Pakistan to search for work in England. North Africans who grew up speaking
French but with little hope of finding a job at home have moved to France. The
former Soviet Republics to the south of Russia are now sending droves of
migrants to Moscow in search of employment. Spain has witnessed an influx of
migrants from Latin American countries.
The pattern is quite simple and
predictable: the colonized country is bled of its resources, its political
independence limited and economic development artificially stunted. When its
people cannot raise a family at home, they move elsewhere—and international
ties make it easiest to move to the colonizing country.
This is the case here at home as
well. The two independent nations that have seen the highest percentage of
their citizens migrate to the United States are countries where the U.S. has
historically been the most involved: the Philippines and Mexico. (This is not
counting the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which has more of its people per
capita living in the continental U.S. than any other nation on earth.)
Over the past two hundred years,
these two nations have been impacted by military, political and economic
intervention from the United States in myriad forms. At various points in
history, forces in the U.S. Congress were pushing to annex the countries
entirely. Both have felt the force of U.S. military intervention on numerous
occasions. To a greater or lesser extent, their economies have been locked into
a neocolonial relationship in which U.S. companies used the Philippines and
Mexico as sources of raw material and markets for manufactured goods, keeping
them from developing their own national businesses. There is little irony in the Mexican folk
saying, “Ay de México…tan lejos de Dios,
tan cerca de los Estados Unidos…” (“Woe is Mexico: so far from God,
so near to the United States.)
U.S. intervention in Mexico began
with a military intervention which deprived the nation of more than half its
national territory, imposing the first of many foreign debts on Mexico. The
pattern of intervention continued into the 20th Century; the
annexation of Mexican industry by U.S. companies was encouraged by the
government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. The most recent and most broad-reaching
move taken by U.S. business to take control of Mexico’s economy, however, was
the North American Free Trade Agreement, or “NAFTA”.
In the immigration debate, the
right wing typically calls for heavier enforcement of existing immigration
policy—“the law’s the law”. Meanwhile, the left wing is too often on the
defensive, asking that the existing laws not be enforced as strictly. Far too
little critique is offered about why
the laws are fundamentally unfair, however. As long as we have trade policies
that force migration and immigration laws that criminalize it, we will be left
with a deeply hypocritical policy that is impossible to enforce.
Immigrants’ rights and the
struggle for alternative trade must go hand in hand—you can’t have one without
talking about the other.
