| | Have you ever gotten the feeling that people are wasting massive amounts of their time sitting around figuring out answers to all the wrong questions? Take the immigration "crisis" for example: all of these politicians sit around spending thousands of hours and millions of taxpayer dollars trying to answer the question "how can we stop people from immigrating to our country illegally?" If they actually took a minute to run a self-diagnostic instead of continuing to bang their heads against the wall maybe they'd realize that the real question is "why do people want to risk immigrating to our country illegally?" They'd see very quickly that its because there are no jobs in their country which pay a reasonable wage. If these jobs were available I guarantee that they wouldn't be leaving their families behind to go work in a country where they don't speak the language while risking capture and deportation, or worse. So now our enlightened politicians would start scratching their heads and pondering "why are there no jobs in their country?" The politicians would then wander over to a library and check out a book titled Mexico for Dummies or something of the sort and realize that Mexico has long had an agrarian economy which, while never a wealthy nation, kept unemployment mostly in check for hundreds of years. So what went wrong?
1) American farm subsidies. It is cheaper right now to buy an ear of subsidized American-grown corn in Mexico than to grow one in Mexico as a small landowner. Therefore even if they sold at cost they'd still be getting out-competed. Because of this the small farmers have been driven out of business, breaking the back of the agrarian economy and causing skyrocketting unemployment. Unable to raise protective tariffs to protect their farmers from American competition due to the free-trade stipulations of NAFTA and lacking the capital to provide their own subsidies, the Mexican government has had to stand by helplessly while their farmers have been driven out of business by large American-based farm corporations.
2) International debt. Over 50% of every tax dollar collected by the Mexican government is spent on the interest on their internationally held debt. Unlike many Latin American countries which have been allowed to default on their debt or have been given some debt forgiveness by the World Bank, Mexico has not received such aid. Also, in order to receive these loans the Mexican government was forced to agree to "economic restructuring plans" dictated by the World Bank. In these plans Mexico has been forced to allow trans-national corporations to set up factories and harvest Mexican resources. These corporations are exempt from most of Mexico's tax and environmental legislation (which has had a devistating effect on the Mexican ecology and has caused a massive spike in cancer, birth defects, and other pollution-related illnesses in the last two decades), transfer profits overseas which leeches capital from the Mexican economy, and pays workers below living wages (wages sufficient to live above the UN-determined poverty line).
So if illegal immigration is such a "crisis" why have we as a nation stood by while our government has allowed the economic rape of our neighbor to the south, causing its inhabitants to be willing to risk injury or death just to escape? Is it really that important to us that Wal-Mart or McDonald's are able to provide that product to us for a few cents cheaper that we'll turn a blind eye to the fact that we're participating in the economic and environmental exploitation of Mexico, Latin America, southeast Asia, and the third world? When will the exploitation reach a point where it is bad enough that Americans will be willing to take a hit to the pocketbooks to stop it? Does that point even exist?
Hey, why diagnose the illness when you can just patch over the symptoms? "You know what we need Jim-Bob? A really fucking big wall. That'll keep them Mex-i-canos out yessirree."
Okay rant over...
If anyone is interested in learning more about social justice movements or other issues related to corporate exploitation in the third world let me know and I'll set you up with enough reading to keep you busy for a while haha  . Also, I highly recommend reading up on Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas (EZLN) who are a group in the state of Chiapas in Mexico (one of the poorest states) who are fighting to force the Mexican government to provide basic services to the poorer indigenous members of Mexican society who have long been discriminated against, and to pressure the government to sever ties with economically damaging contracts like NAFTA and the World Bank economic restructuring plans.
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| | Posted 7/22/2008 8:42 PM - 22 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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