Letter to the editor
The Trib's leading editorial today, endorsing Felipe Calderon of the PAN for the upcoming Mexican presidential election, annoyed me so much that I wrote a letter to the editor. You can read the offending editorial here. I'm sure they won't print my response, so I will have to content myself with posting it for a tiny audience...
"In endorsing the PAN candidate Felipe Calderon in the upcoming Mexican presidential election, your editors paint a one-sided picture of the relationship between free trade and neo-liberal economic policies, development, and emigration from Mexico. They present foreign investment as the only path to the creation of jobs that would stem the tide of out-migration from Mexico while dismissing the populist agenda of the PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as a recipe for debt and inflation.
There’s plenty of reason to doubt whether Lopez Obrador could really deliver on his campaign promises to ease the pain of Mexico’s lower classes. Still, we here in the U.S. should recognize that encouraging foreign investment is no simple solution to the pressure of undocumented migration from Mexico. At least in the short-term, free trade will actually stimulate more out-migration by disrupting the rural economy. For example, the appropriation of rural lands for the development of highways and industrial parks to attract investment displaces small landholders. NAFTA’s elimination of import tariffs on American agricultural products further threatens Mexican farmers unable to compete with cheap, subsidized U.S. corn. What happens to these people—and there are millions of them in Southern Mexico—when they are forced to abandon the countryside? Some may indeed find the promised work in industry and move into the middle class, but others will head straight to the U.S. Even those that do find work in newly created jobs have little security when foreign companies can abandon their plants in Mexico if they find they can pay lower wages in countries like China. Workers who have already moved from rural areas to the city are then likely to make a further move north.
Before deciding that the path of Fox and Calderon is the right one for Mexico (and the U.S.), let’s be realistic about the impact of free trade on Mexico’s poor and not view it as a magic bullet for our own immigration problems."
"In endorsing the PAN candidate Felipe Calderon in the upcoming Mexican presidential election, your editors paint a one-sided picture of the relationship between free trade and neo-liberal economic policies, development, and emigration from Mexico. They present foreign investment as the only path to the creation of jobs that would stem the tide of out-migration from Mexico while dismissing the populist agenda of the PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as a recipe for debt and inflation.
There’s plenty of reason to doubt whether Lopez Obrador could really deliver on his campaign promises to ease the pain of Mexico’s lower classes. Still, we here in the U.S. should recognize that encouraging foreign investment is no simple solution to the pressure of undocumented migration from Mexico. At least in the short-term, free trade will actually stimulate more out-migration by disrupting the rural economy. For example, the appropriation of rural lands for the development of highways and industrial parks to attract investment displaces small landholders. NAFTA’s elimination of import tariffs on American agricultural products further threatens Mexican farmers unable to compete with cheap, subsidized U.S. corn. What happens to these people—and there are millions of them in Southern Mexico—when they are forced to abandon the countryside? Some may indeed find the promised work in industry and move into the middle class, but others will head straight to the U.S. Even those that do find work in newly created jobs have little security when foreign companies can abandon their plants in Mexico if they find they can pay lower wages in countries like China. Workers who have already moved from rural areas to the city are then likely to make a further move north.
Before deciding that the path of Fox and Calderon is the right one for Mexico (and the U.S.), let’s be realistic about the impact of free trade on Mexico’s poor and not view it as a magic bullet for our own immigration problems."
posted by ellen at 5:06 PM
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