Women's Crossroads

Usually I cheer Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times, but his two latest, on the Mexican immigration controversy currently roiling Congress, really have me disappointed.

Not surprisingly, Krugman takes an economist's point of view in looking at the problem of nearly 11 million undocumented low-wage workers in the U.S., many if not most of them from Mexico and Central America. He points out that "low-skilled immigration depresses the wages of less-skilled native-born Americans. And immigrants increase the demand for public services, including health care and education. Estimates indicate that low-skilled immigrants don't pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of providing these services."

Then he goes off onto another tack, arguing that Congress's "plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one that would admit 400,000 more workers a year," would have the effect of " institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force," moving the U.S. " a big step away from democracy."

Okay, fair enough. What really perplexes me is Krugman's parochialism here. It reminds me of the old parable about the people who became great experts at fishing dead people out of the river and burying them, but never thought to look upriver and see what was causing all those corpses to float downriver to begin with!

Why is it that literally millions of so-called "low-skilled workers" (who actually are highly skilled in agricultural work, construction, hospitality and service care) are streaming out of their hometowns in the Latin American and Caribbean countries, and braving the rigors of illegal immigration, cold, isolation, uncertainty and disenfranchisement, to toil away at jobs that Americans don't want to do?

Could it be that we bear some responsibility in this? Why is it that Congressional Republicans, and journalists, not to mention ordinary Americans, seem to conveniently forget that the U.S. spent billions of dollars in military aid to the dictators and super-elites that wrecked the Central American countries during the course of the Cold War?

What about the FTAA, have we forgotten about that already? Why is it that farmers who used to get by with some dignity in their small towns in Mexico and Central America, now find that their agricultural products are being undercut by North American corporations who have flooded the markets with cheap commodities and produce? Small farmers across Latin America and the Caribbean are being forced out of the market by the insatiable maw of big agri-business, and what else can they do when they look at their hungry children but head north to try to earn some greenbacks to send home?

And then there's the World Bank, with its marvelous "structural adjustment" programs, which remind me of nothing so much as time-honored "scientific" remedies like leeching, purging, starvation, and more recently, electroshock therapy. If the patient survives, you call the doctor a hero! If she doesn't, it was God's will anyway that she die.

The way to address the problem of illegal immigration is not to build walls, or step up border patrols, or pass guest-worker laws. The only way to staunch the tide of human beings desperate to make a living for their families is to take active steps to improve the economies of their home countries, and that's what Paul Krugman should be telling his New York Times readers. Not by passing arcane patent laws that take away indigenous rights to native medicinal plants; not by flooding the market with cheap imports and forcing local production into exports; not by continuing to support the ruling wealthy elites on the backs of the majority of the people.

Once again, we must look beyond narrow self-interest and realize that in the 21st century our world is smaller than ever before, and we sink or swim together. It's time to look upriver and begin the long process of making sure that our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean have the means to live out productive, happy lives in their own home countries. If Congress feels it has a few billion dollars to throw at the "immigration problem" this month, that's where the money should go: to building schools, not walls; to encouraging small-scale sustainable farming, not subsidizing American agri-business; quite simply, to putting the well-being of the masses over the profit of a few.