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Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community
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The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA there as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages, and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the U.S. They were horribly wrong: * Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families. * Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs. * Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5% under NAFTA. * Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day. * U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land. * Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2an hour. * Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40% of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the #1 employer. * 19 million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed. So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do? The wrong debate In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty. Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up--up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers, and small businesses--not merely in Mexico, but in our country as well. |