Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead told us that morality is largely a matter of the breadth of consideration of the consequences of an action. He also made clear that issues should be viewed in as wide a context as possible. Judged by these principles, we Americans are not doing well. Last year this nation was guided by the press into discussing Katrina with little attention to the role of global warming. As a result the likelihood is that the probable increase of frequency and intensity of storms is playing a small role in post-Katrina planning. An even smaller role is assigned in this context to considering how we might reduce our contribution to the increase of storms.

This year we are guided into discussing immigration with little attention to the history of U.S. relations with Mexico or the role of economic globalization. We forget that much of the present United States was settled by Mexicans and later taken from Mexico by force. We fail to recognize the influence that racism has had, and continues to have, on our society in general and our immigration policies in particular. We do not bring to mind the long history of American imperialism in Latin America as a whole and Mexico in particular. We fail to recognize in the North American Free Trade Agreement the continuation of our exploitative and imperialist policies.

Within the narrow horizon offered us for discussion, the arguments on both sides have force. What part of “illegal” do we not understand? To reward those who enter the country illegally with amnesty and eventual citizenship cannot be regarded as an ideal solution. It certainly does not discourage future illegal immigration.

On the other hand, no response is acceptable that deals cruelly with admirable people. The illegal immigrants as a group have shown great courage and sacrificed much in order to have the opportunity to take unattractive jobs in this nation. Many of them have done all this for the sake of their families and in the process have contributed extensively to our economy. To round them up and expel them, even if this were possible, would be horrendously cruel; it would also cause havoc in many of our businesses as well as in the economy of Mexico.

There is probably no short-term solution except compromise. Some modification of the Senate’s proposal, generally supported by Bush, may be the best we can do. But it solves no problems. By rewarding those who have previously entered illegally, it will increase the incentive to come. By tightening the border, it will increase the conflict and suffering involved in illegal entry.     

The only long-term solution is to reduce the need to immigrate, and that can only be accomplished as conditions in Mexico improve. If we ask why the flood of illegal immigration has grown in recent years, surely the answer is not that it has become easier to enter the United States or that conditions of labor for illegal immigrants have improved. No, the answer is that opportunities in Mexico have declined.

Conditions in Mexico for peasants and workers improved gradually from 1950 to the early 1980s. Since then they have grown worse. As in so much of the world, the rich have become much richer, but the poor have been massively uprooted, and many of them have become poorer even by the standard economic measures, which ignore many of their real human losses along with the degradation of their environment. The number of the destitute has increased most of all.

What happened in the early 1980s? The answer is a worldwide shift, engineered by the Reagan administration, from an international community of national economies toward a single global economy. Mexico was forced to abandon its modestly successful national economy and to subordinate itself to global capital. Those Mexicans who could participate in this new regime profited handsomely, and they are largely in control of the government and the media. Those who could not participate became powerless pawns, many of whom were fully expendable.

NAFTA, negotiated by Reagan and forced through a reluctant Congress by the newly elected Clinton, was the most thoroughgoing expression of this development so far as Mexico was concerned. Ironically one argument for NAFTA was that by improving the Mexican economy, it would reduce the pressure to immigrate into the United States. Perhaps some of its supporters believed this, but the application of a little common sense to a study of its purposes made clear the falsehood of this claim. One main function of NAFTA was to shift Mexican agriculture from peasant farming to export-oriented agribusiness. This means substituting oil and machinery for labor. Millions of peasants became superfluous. Some found manufacturing jobs in the new maquiladoras along the Rio Grande. Others swelled the favelas around the cities. Still others crossed the border into the United States, usually illegally.

It could hardly be denied that economic globalization, with the shift of manufacturing from unionized factories in the United States to Mexico with its government-controlled labor, reduced well-paying jobs for workers in this country. It has, in fact, wiped out much of the industrial-labor section of the middle class and it threatens other parts of this class as well.

However, idealistic Americans were assured that U.S. capital investment in Mexican factories would lead to a rise in income for Mexican workers, whose need was greater than that of Americans. Sadly, many ethicists swallowed this lie. But why should wages and working conditions in Mexico improve? The Mexican government has always prevented the emergence of any effective labor organization, and the depopulation of the countryside provides far more workers than the factories need. In any case, any increase of costs in Mexican factories heightened the interest of their owners in still lower costs in Central America. And then, expanding globalization led to moving some of this production to China. Where would the now unemployed Mexican factory workers go?

The “race to the bottom” inherent in the global economic system has hit the Mexican poor hard. In this context, large scale immigration to the U.S. has been a safety valve for Mexico. The earnings of illegal workers in the United States sent back to their families in Mexico have often been the alternative to destitution there. The suffering that might otherwise become a source of revolutionary feeling has been alleviated.

Meanwhile illegal immigration has been a boon to wealthy Americans. Competition with illegal immigrants has kept the wages of poor Americans, including legal Mexican immigrants, low. The presence of millions of people willing to work for whatever they can get, even under illegally dangerous and obviously harmful conditions, has made unionization difficult. It has also been a boon to the middle class, who now receive many services inexpensively. Only poor Americans suffer, and they are largely unorganized and rarely vote in large numbers.

Two ideals are possible in relation to these matters. One ideal is to do away with national boundaries. These boundaries have been largely overcome for capital and goods, but they remain in force for people. Our present quandary results from this. Opening all boundaries would be a logical move, but it would lead to a rapid and drastic redistribution of global population that few people really want.

If we do away with national boundaries, it is evident that we would need a global government with a great deal of centralized power. It would have to be in position to establish rules controlling the corporations that now rule the world. And for this to help the world’s people, we would have to find some way of preventing the reproduction at the global level of our problems in the United States: the control of the government by the corporations that government needs to control for the sake of the people.

The other ideal is to organize the world, both politically and economically, around communities that are relatively self-sufficient and self-governing. This would require empowering people to control the resources of their regions and to utilize them for their own benefit. They would have the task of both supporting business within their regions and also preventing business from dominating the community. Of course, community control would not prevent trade, but decisions about trade would be made by the communities involved.

If Mexico developed its own resources for its own people, they would not all become rich. But it could end destitution and improve the lot of the poor. The same would be true of the United States. We would pay more for goods and might prize them more. Workers would be better off. Transnational corporations would be broken up into national ones. Profits to capital might decline. Both Mexico and the United States could protect their natural environment for the sake of future Mexicans and Americans.

Even if, for a long time, living standards in the United States were higher than those in Mexico, the incentive to immigrate illegally would be reduced. Instead of spending huge sums trying to control the global oil supply, fighting a war against terror the main consequence of which is to increase the number of terrorists, and protecting an inevitably porous border against well-meaning immigrants, a small portion of the resources that now go into these projects could be diverted to helping Mexico through the difficult adjustments required to recover its control over its own economy and to reduce the suffering of its poor.