Are U.S. Trade Policies & NAFTA Causing An Influx of Undocumented Workers in U.S.?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined on the telephone by David Bacon, veteran labor journalist who writes for a number of publications, including The Nation and The Progressive. He’s also a programmer on Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley, author of a number of books, including The Children of NAFTA. His new book will be called Communities Without Borders. He was in Los Angeles yesterday. Our guest in studio are Javier Rodriguez in Los Angeles and Justino Rodriguez here in New York. David Bacon, thank you for joining us. Can you link what we’re seeing in this country, millions of people on the streets in this latest May Day protest, to the greater story of the trade agreements in the Americas?
DAVID BACON: Sure, Amy. In fact, I think a lot of the people in the two huge marches here in Los Angeles did that themselves. For the first time, I saw lots of people carrying signs that said “no guest worker programs,” and this is, I think, different and something that went beyond what we’ve seen before, because, really we’ve been told now by Congress for quite a while that the only alternative to the odious Sensenbrenner bill, which would criminalize 12 million people is to allow Congress, the Senate specifically, to pass enormous guest worker programs and, in fact, force people who are here without papers to become guest workers as the price of legalization. And there were many, many people, including speakers up on stage also condemning this idea.
Really, what’s going on here is that the trade agreements, like NAFTA, and this neo-liberal free trade regime is displacing enormous numbers of people around the world so that worldwide there are about 170 million people living outside the countries in which they were born, and overwhelmingly this is due to the kind of enforced poverty that this free trade regime is producing.
But what is really kind of new here is that the corporate elite, large corporations, are now seeing this flow of people as something that can be used as a whole new source of profit, so that we see proposals for programs, like guest worker programs, in a number of different countries. In Britain, for instance, this is called ‘managed migration,’ and we see the same thing in Europe and, in fact, at the W.T.O. negotiations in Hong Kong, there was a formal proposal introduced called Mode 4, which essentially would set up a huge new international guest worker program. So migration has always been part of the free trade regime, because of the fact that the imposition of this regime displaces people, but now it’s becoming even more a part of this regime, because really in a sense the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, financial institutions, large corporations see migration itself as being something that they can turn into a profit.
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