As Bush continues to troll for votes to shore up Republicans in the November elections, the immigration debate moves further away from any informed discussion of why workers uproot themselves and make treacherous journeys to other countries, only to take miserable jobs with employers who exploit them in every imaginable way.
The answers to the questions that underpin the U.S. immigration controversy are readily available but ignored by Republicans who feed off racial and ethnic tensions.
The U.S./Canada border is longer and less protected than the U.S./Mexico border, but few Republicans ask why Canadians do not flood across it to the U.S.
Around the world, unemployment and poverty drive workers to migrate from the developing countries to the richer nations.
More than half of the 10 million to 12 million immigrants with irregular status in the U.S. are Mexican. Every year, more than 400 Mexicans die trying to cross the U.S. border, according to the Mexican consulate.
In Mexico, per capita GDP in 2005 was $10,100, compared with $42,000 in the U.S. Forty percent of the Mexican population lives in poverty, compared with 12 percent of the population in the U.S., according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.
Mexican immigrants in the U.S. send an estimated $16 billion a year back to their families to try to pull them out of poverty.
A growing number of the immigrants who cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. are originally from Guatemala, where 2005 per capita GDP was $5,200 and 75 percent of the population lives in poverty.
The Hondurans who cross Mexico to the U.S. are leaving a nation where 53 percent of the population lives in poverty and the annual per capita GDP was only $2,800 in 2005.
Immigration is not an American problem but a global one, which needs a global solution.
According to the United Nations (UN), 60 percent of all immigration represents people moving from poor developing nations to richer developed nations.
According to the International Labor Organization, 185 million people around the world are unemployed, and 550 million workers earn less than $1 a day.
Half of the world’s 2.8 billion workers earn less than $2 a day.
In many developing countries, more than half of the workers are employed in the informal sector of the economy, where working conditions and wages are totally unregulated.
Over the past decade, the industrialized nations are the only ones to experience falling unemployment rates. In every other region, unemployment either remained stable or increased.
Global immigration is rising rapidly because income differentials around the world are widening. The UN has concluded that because most immigrants move to escape poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor nations will generate ever-larger numbers of immigrants.
The number of immigrants worldwide rose from 82 million in 1970 to 175 million in 2000 to 200 million in 2005.
According to the UN, migrants who move from low-income to high-income countries are often able to gain an income that is 20 to 30 times higher than they would be able to gain at home, moving from abject poverty to a sustainable existence.
In addition to immigrants who move to support themselves, the World Bank estimates that immigrants send home about $150 billion a year through formal channels to help family members survive, plus an estimated $300 billion transferred informally.
The global labor force will increase from 3.0 billion in 2001 to 3.4 billion by 2010, an average increase of 40 million per year, with 38 million of that annual growth coming from the developing nations and only 2 million from the developed nations, according to the World Bank.
Half of the workers in the developing nations are small farmers who live in poverty. The world’s richer countries spend more than $300 billion a year in agricultural subsidies, more than six times the amount they spend on overseas aid. This subsidization policy makes it impossible for small farmers to make a living and drives an increasing number of them to migrate to the developed nations.
The UN, the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO) have all offered detailed solutions to the immigration problem, including humane immigration policies, increased foreign aid and assistance to the developing nations, and trade policies that allow workers and farmers in developing nations to make a decent living. Pursuing these policies would cost far less than the Bush move to criminalize immigrants and wall up the borders.
© 2006 Labor Research Association
Related Links:
Immigration Through Time
http://library.thinkquest.org/20619/Timeline.html
Suarez-Orozco on the Largest Migratory Wave in History
http://www.nysun.com/article/22624
By DANIELA GERSON: November 7, 2005
After relocating to New York recently, the directors of the Harvard Immigration Projects this year founded New York University's Institute for Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings. A director of the institute, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, spoke with The New York Sun's Daniela Gerson about why more people than ever are on the move and how that affects New York.
Q. The number of foreign-born people in America is at a record high. How does immigration to the country compare with global trends?
A: Immigrants in the United States are over 35 million people. That's the largest number in the history of our country; it's also larger than the entire Canadian population. While immigration peaked in the 1990s, we continue to have very large numbers of immigrants coming to our cities. What remains very, very interesting and has become kind of an enduring problem in the new immigration, is that while overall numbers have declined, the number of undocumented immigrants has remained stable. Since the 1990s, the United States has been receiving about a million people every year - that's legal and illegal - but now probably more undocumented immigrants come to the United States than documented immigrants.
Immigration today is part of a global phenomenon. The best estimates suggest that we have between 175 and 185 million immigrants worldwide. This is the largest migratory wave in human history. For the first time, all regions of the world are involved in large-scale migration.
What is driving the record migration today?
Love and work and war explain why people migrate. By love, I mean family reunification. If you look at the million people who came to the United States last year, roughly two-thirds of them came through the family reunification mechanism. ... Work is wage differentials, and the economic issues that drive the new immigration are so powerful. The average wage differential today between, say, North Africa and Europe is in the order of 15 to one. The average wage differential between Mexico and the United States today is probably nine or 10 to one. So there are huge economic incentives for immigration. ... By war I mean human-made catastrophes, in addition to of course natural catastrophes, have been huge and central to global migration patterns in this century.
What's the primary difference in the needs of the members of the current wave of immigrants and those who swept the city in the last great wave?
One hundred years ago, millions of Eastern Europeans, Irish, Italians, and Germans were coming into our city in huge numbers. ... Through floor-shop mobility you could get good jobs and you could move up the socioeconomic hierarchy even if you had very little schooling. Huge proportions of immigrants 100 years ago - some estimates suggest that up to 80% of all Italians - never went to school. Yet across generations they became relatively successful, middle-class citizens. Today, because of the global economy, formal education is much more important.
Washington has been promoting a guest-worker program, which would provide temporary visas to foreign workers to do jobs Americans are unwilling to do, as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package. Do you sense that policymakers in Washington understand the challenges of immigration reform?
My sense is that the political class see immigration as a very difficult problem to manage, and I'm not sure they fully understand the kinds of complex processes that get established once you bring in thousands and thousands of workers even on a so-called temporary basis. Immigration tends to generate momentum, and more often than not, that momentum sustains itself.
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