During his July 1 speech, President Obama described the “two poles” that frame the immigration debate. At one end, xenophobes would like to deport all undocumented immigrants and fortify the barriers – legal and physical – to entering the US. At the other end, immigrant rights activists would like to grant legal residency to all of those without papers. Obama’s loosely proposed approach to immigration reform would be some compromise between these two ‘extremes’. Listening to his speech however, I can’t help but think how absolutely irrelevant the whole immigration conversation is to Lupita, Armando, Mary, Fichas, Ana, or any of the other youths I met in Tamaula.
Youth in Tamaula on día de los reyes
Tamaula is a small village on a hilltop in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. In this town of about 300 residents, you can find many senior citizens, children, goats, chickens, dogs, donkeys, and horses. It would be far more difficult to come across a man between the ages of 18 and 50. To find these men, you would have to go to the agricultural fields of North Carolina, chicken processing plants of Georgia, or landscaping crews of Washington state. Increasingly, adult women and boys as young as 14 are taking part in the stream of migrant labor as well.
Tamaula’s youths know that they will all live in the US at some point. But attaining legal residency is not their primary concern. The fact is that most of them would prefer to not have to leave their community in the first place. What they want is access to a high school education, a well to provide them with potable water, and – most importantly – a way of making a living that does not separate them from their families or endanger their lives. But the national, state, and municipal governments have been reluctant to fund infrastructure projects or education in their community. Factory jobs are located too far away and the campesinos can’t compete with the high school-educated workers from the nearby city of Irapuato.
There was a period of a few decades in Mexico when political leaders used economic policy in an effort to achieve full employment along with universal access to infrastructure and services. That period abruptly ended in 1982 when the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to 21% and Mexico announced that it couldn’t repay its loans. Wall Street had heavily invested in Latin American debt during the 1970s and Reagan even made plans to nationalize banks like Citigroup should they fail as a result of the Mexican default. But they did not fail. Instead, the International Monetary Fund provided billions of dollars in bailout loans under the condition that the Mexican government drastically restructure its economy.
Since the restructuring, which limited government spending, the size of the public sector, and the ability of the government to nurture local industries, Mexico’s economy has grown more slowly and much more unequally. Wages have fallen. Neither the state nor the markets can provide people with a decent safety net. Financial products, goods, services, and people now flow across national borders with increased regularity. Only the flow of people is criminalized.
On our side of the border, the national debate has only focused on the migration of people into the United States. We have not addressed the causes of migration and we’ve posited many false assumptions about the motives of the migrants. This has led to policies with unintended consequences. The militarization of the border, for example, has not kept people out, it has kept people in. It was only after Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 that a majority of Mexican immigrants decided that they would probably not try to return to Mexico (according to a Mexican Migration Project study).
An immigration policy that addresses a few aspects of legal status is not “comprehensive”. Obama’s speech sets us up for more of the “patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions” that he derides.
A few ideas of what real comprehensive immigration reform should mean:
- Establishment of transnational labor citizenship.
- Enforcement of the modest worker protections that exist.
- Allowing nations to subordinate economic policy to social development goals.