Migration – a product of “Free Market” Reforms

By Duane Campbell

Labor journalist and photo journalist  David Bacon is a frequent contributor to Talking Union.  In a new three part series, “Migration- a product of Free Market Reforms” he describes the displacement of some 500,000 people from Oaxaca, Mexico.  Most to the fields of California.

David Bacon

“It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that drive people to work for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their family at home together,” says Harvard historian John Womack. “The debt-induced crash in the 1980s, before NAFTA, drove people north…The financial crash and the Rubin-induced reform of NAFTA, New York’s financial expropriation of Mexican finances between 1995 and 2000, drove the economically wrecked, dispossessed and impoverished north again.”

The U.S. immigration debate has no vocabulary that describes what happens to migrants before they cross borders – the factors that force them into motion. In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz’s uprooted coffee pickers or unemployed workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because that debate doesn’t recognize their existence before they leave Mexico. It would be more accurate to call them migrants, and the process migration, since that takes into account both people’s communities of origin and those where they travel to find work.

Displacement itself becomes an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress in the quarter century since IRCA was passed tried to come to grips with the policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters and farmers, in spite of the fact that Congress members voted for these policies. In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which would cause more displacement and more migration.

Read the entire piece here.

http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6038

The dominant economic policy in the U.S. is called neo-liberalism.  We have two strands of neo liberalism- the moderates in the Democratic Party and the fundamentalists in the Republican Party.  There is a small segment of the Democratic Party, about 100 votes in Congress, who recognize the pain and failure of this policy.

 

Neo liberalism is the ideology of corporate capitalism since about 1970 and continuing into the present.  For example, it was the organizing ideology of the coup and government of Pinochet in Chile. It could also be termed fundamentalist capitalism.

As socialists  we  fight against their ideology because their system causes too much suffering, unnecessary poverty for millions and  too much death.  We offer alternatives that stress social cooperation, the development of all of the people rather than a few and a decent standard of living for all.

The goal of neoliberalism is a state that enforces cut backs,  austerity, outsourcing, privatization and waging a race to the bottom over labor costs. Capitalism uses states to impose their rules, their austerity programs, and their wars. Our first project is to oppose neoliberalism right here in the U.S.A.

We, in DSA,  are challenging capital through fighting for its opposite: expanded trade union rights,  fair trade over free trade,  controlling and regulating  financial markets so they have limited ability to loot the society; fighting foreclosures, maintaining and expanding public education, demanding debt forgiveness, pushing for renewable energy sources.  In part we pursue these goals by  nationalizing the banks and  shrinking the military so it can’t be a weapon used against progressive foreign insurgencies.  We seek to create  a democratic foreign policy that stops the military–public and private– from being an arm of capital,  a vehicle for the suppression of popular and democratic movements of resistance to capitalist exploitation.