The Failure OF NAFTA And Other Free Trade Agreements Is Driving The U.S. Illegal Immigration Crisis

Poverty conditions that are side effects of the failure of "free trade" agreemnents such as NAFTA are driving the U.S. illegal immigration crisis, where an estimated 12 million illegal immigration mainly economic refugees, many of whom watched their wages decrease by 1/3 in Mexico as a result of NAFTA is driving poverty conditions similar to the economic conditions that created the wave of Irish immigration to the U.S. as a result of the poverty created by the potato virus induced famine.

Some large U.S. corporate farm concerms pushed for NAFTA in order to create a market for their cheaply produced corporate farmed wheat and corn. This created an economic tidal wave for Mexico, which is a far more agarian economy than the U.S., where this developing world economy is heavily dependent on massive agricultural labor than the U.S. This had the effect of driving down farming related wages by a full 1/3 and forcing many in Mexico into poverty and starvation. There was no way that Mexican families who are more dependent on farm income related wages could hold onto their farms or survive a radical 1/3 cut in income.

NAFTA rippled all through Mexican society, creating a tidal wave of poverty and an economic refugee crisis for the U.S.

NAFTA propelled Mexico into the worst economic crisis conditions in over 60 years, including a huge two million plus surge in unemployment, huge interest rate hikes that closed more than 28,000 businesses in Mexico, and resulted in poverty conditions where many homes and farms were lost. More than 50% of Mexico's population is now in "extreme poverty" since NAFTA, a huge increase in homelessness and starvation in which running across the U.S. borders to seek even minimal work as a gardener or lowly paid food service worker seems better than starvation or death in a Mexico economy destroyed so that wealthy U.S. corporate farm interests could increase profits by upseting the normal wage labor status related to homegrown Mexican agriculture.

There is also a political tidal wave of proCastro antiAmerican governments winning elections in South America. One of these leftists is likely to win the next Mexican oresidential election, putting a proCastro, proCuba govenment right on the U.S. border and setting the U.S. up for a serious conflict of values between nations right up to the border. With so much poverty increasing in South America thanks to NAFTA, CAFTA and other "so-called" free trade agreements, the wave of antoAmerican governments will only increase in South America, encircling our Southern border with hostile states.

In the U.S. the political right is torn apart by silly discussions of building a fence that will cost billions and billions of dollars. Yet nations such as China built the Great Wall, and it never kept British imperialism or Japanese military agression out of China. For every wall built, there is a shovel or ladder sold.

Much of the American right is intellectually unable to comprehend much more than a merely racist antiimmigrant mindset. There simply is not the intellectual compacity to look at the tidal wave of poverty that NAFTA set into motion in Mexico, driving wages down by a 1/3 and driving up unemployment, homelessness and starvation that is fueling both the illegal immigration crisis in the U.S. and a wave of antiAmericanism that is electing a wave for proCastro governments in South America.

Many American idustrialists and others in the business community profit from either the dumping of corporate agriculture cheaply produced corn and wheat dumped on the Mexican economy and destroying the lives of miliions of Mexicans, or by exploiting the labor of legal or illegal economic refugees and immigrant in low paying agricultural or food service jobs in the U.S. that do not pay a living wage here, and are hard pressing state governments in states such as California with burdensome health care or social service costs.

There is no real discussion in Congress for addressing the real roots of the Mexican poverty crisis that is rooted in the extreme failure of NAFTA, CAFTA and other "free trade" agreements. For this reason this poverty crisis will only worsen for those in the U.S., Mexico and in South America.