A film about the devastation of Mexican farmlands
Although IRCA (read about anti-immigration legislation here) was the last law enacted by the United States before the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA in 1994, it exacerbated the migration of Mexican workers to the US illegally. This law, in combination of the factors associated with its passage, promoted the outpouring of oppressed migrants from Mexico and retaliation by citizens through media.
The Decimation of Mexico’s Farmlands
Mexican Farmer Harvesting Crops
One such factor that was responsible for the Mexican exodus was the decimation of Mexico’s environment. Previously, the majority of Mexican farming involved subsistence farming of several crops to support the nutritional needs of the family. In this system, excess crops were then sold at market or traded. This not only supplanted the nutritional needs of the family, but also stratified the wealth throughout a community.
The introduction of market competition (including the passage of NAFTA) resulted in the removal of foreign tariffs on imported goods, such as American Agribusiness products. With that, the pragmatism of subsistence farming was reduced in favor of commercial farming; farming in the US was heavily subsidized due to legislative bills such as the 2002 Farm Bill, which subsidized the industry by as much as 40%. Mexican farmers turned to economically competitive agribusiness, such as herding cattle and raising cash crops to compete. However, the costs of transforming subsistence farming lands into cash croplands suitable for plants, such as cacao or for cattle proved to be very expensive.
The Mexican farming industry took further measures to compete with American subsidization, as noted in the Carnegie Endowment’s piece on “NAFTA’s Promise and Reality”:
In response to NAFTA competitive pressure, Mexico agribusiness used more fertilizers and other chemicals, costing $36 billion per year in pollution. Rural farmers expanded into more marginal land, resulting in deforestation at a rate of 630,000 hectares per year.
Nevertheless, agribusiness resulted in detrimental effects for farming communities in Mexico. Not only did the land become arid due to overuse, but the nutritional statuses of farming families were dramatically worsened by the switch to cash crop.
The Maquiladora Program
Although the maquiladora program was seen as a neoliberal structure that would serve as the very antidote to emigration, Mexico has now become the “principal country of emigrants in the world”, meaning that the program influenced the widespread emigration of Mexicans to other countries. The program itself was proposed as the substantive implementation of NAFTA; advocates portrayed it as a win-win proposition for Mexico and the United States and as an avenue for reducing asymmetries between those countries and Canada.
However, according to Professor Janice Miller of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the maquila industry involved American-owned factories residing in Mexican bordertowns that received components duty-free for assembly and re-exported finished products that were taxed on the labor value added. Manufactured products from these plants are never incorporated into the Mexican economy; they are instead exported back to the United States.
As a result, the product itself becomes disembodied from the labor that went into the product. This separation of the product from the labor subsequently leaves Mexico to benefit only from them wages that workers received for their labor. These wages, though, represent at most 30% of the total export value, leaving the unaccounted 70% to become incorporated into the American economy. In fact, Wise argued the maquila program to be largely responsible for migration to America because the Mexican economy was basically restricted to wages, that is, the value of the labor incorporated into the exports.
Workers assembling products in a maquila.
Though the program was also seen as an aid to the job market in Mexico, the little revenue re-incorporated into the Mexican economy left the country impoverished. In terms of further employment, the options were scarce for Mexicans; due to the lack of jobs in the formal and labor-intensive sectors, as many as 89% of these workers at one time were relegated to scarce employment options such as working in the informal sector as house servants, street vendors or suchlike, or migrating to the United States. Specifically, emigration to the United States has affected Mexico’s population so much that 31 percent of the municipalities in
Mexico are now suffering from depopulation. Therefore, NAFTA’s free trade policies, reinforced by the effects of the maquiladora program, compelled millions of Mexicans to immigrate to America. Below is a short film about the maquiladora program and harsh conditions there.
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