July 11, 2006

The debate on the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States is ignoring a key issue: free trade.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promised member countries more jobs, trade surpluses and increased standards of living. But that's not how things turned out.

Mexico has been growing corn for 10,000 years. But under NAFTA, which was supposed to level the playing fields, Mexico opened its markets to imports from the United States, including corn.

Mexican farmers, mostly operating small-scale family farms, were unable to compete against giant U.S. corn producers. These corn producers are the largest single recipient of U.S. government subsidies -- $10.1 billion, or some 10 times greater than the total Mexican agricultural budget in 2000.

This resulted in an export subsidy of between $105 million and $145 million annually to dump on the Mexican market.

Not surprisingly then, U.S. corn exports to Mexico have tripled, and they account for almost one-third of the domestic Mexican market, leading to an acute crisis in the Mexican corn sector.

The increase in imports has reduced real prices for Mexican corn by more than 70 percent since 1994, the year NAFTA began.

Declining prices for the 15 million Mexican farmers who depended on the crop have meant declining household incomes, followed by forced migration from their land.

NAFTA has been a death warrant for small farmers.

In 1997, 47 percent of the Mexican population was engaged in agriculture, according to Food and Agriculture Organization figures. By 2010, that number will have dropped to 18 percent, the organization estimates.

Since the passage of NAFTA, an estimated 2 million Mexican family farmers have been displaced from land while corn-based tortilla prices have increased by nearly 50 percent. Millions of people gave been forced to migrate, desperate to escape poverty, many of them crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to feed their families.

Rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have fallen.

NAFTA has benefited a few sectors of the economy: the sweatshops known as maquiladoras, as well as the very wealthy. For the rest of Mexicans, including the vast majority of workers, it has increased inequality and reduced incomes and job quality.

Hoping for better lives, they are willing to risk crossing the border, if only to find indentured servitude in the fields of the United States, incarceration at the border, xenophobic legislators and sometimes even death. In 2005, an estimated 400 Mexicans died trying to cross the border.

A fence or wall will not be able to keep people from crossing the U.S. border. In fact, as the new Central American Free Trade Agreement takes hold, more small farmers and the working poor will be displaced -- this time in Central American countries.

We should not criminalize undocumented immigrants. Instead, the United States should get rid of or renegotiate its free trade agreements to make them more fair for small farmers.

As long as goods and capital move freely across borders, so, too, will the hungry, the destitute and the dispossessed.

Anuradha Mittal is executive director of the Oakland Institute (www.oaklandinstitute.org), a policy think tank whose mission is to promote public participation and fair debate on critical economic, social and foreign policy issues. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.