Essay on Globalization Creates Migration

        Maria Isabel Vasquez Jiminez, another undocumented worker in the U.S., on May 16, 2008, 17 years old and pregnant, died of heat stroke. Her husband and Maria, when Maria collapsed in the 105-degree heat, were working in the fields nearby Stockton, California. At least six workers died that summer because of heat stroke in the areas of California and Maria was one of them.

        A new book of a well-known labor journalist, David Bacon titled “Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants” helps the readers to understand the human tragedies and economic processes that have been a driven force for workers to migrate and even to die.

        Through on-the-spot reporting and interviews from both U.S. immigrant neighborhoods and workplaces and impoverished communities abroad, Bacon, former labor organizer, and journalist show how trade and economic policy of the United States creates conditions to set migration into motion and displace communities.

        In the developing countries such as Guatemala and Mexico, economic restructuring plans that International Monetary Fund has imposed and trade policies of FTAA (The Free Trade Area of the Americas), NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement), and GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) have been leading the rate of unemployment to over 25%, ultimately producing a migration to the United States. The global neo-liberal capitalism’s economic forces, in the current era, are unrestrained by the governments. Neo-liberal policies in Mexico have devastated the countryside.

        Government subsidies for produce, corn, and sugar were ended, and projects of development were stopped. The government policies in Central America and Mexico have driven thousands of people off of their homelands; many come to the United States looking for jobs. In pursuit of earnings for the minority, the impoverishment of the vast majority has pushed millions of people to migrate in search of employment and food. Then, after the migration has created, the government of the U.S. makes the immigrant labor “illegal” so that more profits could be provided for corporations.

    It is argued by Bacon on page 69 of the book, “In the global economy, people are displaced because the economies of their countries of origin are transformed, to enable corporations and national elites to transfer wealth out." Global migration is produced by global capitalism, and it will continue to do so for a predictable future.

    Bacon in his book “Illegal People” has provided detailed, vivid, and honest accounts of how migration works, who are the entities that exploit immigration, what is the effect of immigration on labor, and, also, the crisis produced in both the sending countries and the receiving countries.

        This book is fascinating that teaches it reader about some economics and makes them understand trade policy. In Displacement and Migration, chapter three of the book, Bacon described in concrete detail that how neo-liberalism and NAFTA produced migration. NAFTA increased the level of employment and exploitation in the low-income Maquiladora (a factory located in Mexico that a foreign company runs and the factory exports its products to a country of origin of that company) sector along the United State Mexican border. The agricultural industry of Mexico has suffered a steady loss of some jobs, and now Mexico even has to import the corn to feed the people living in Mexico.

        Millions of people come to the United States driven out by a high level of unemployment increasing poverty level in their home countries. People are driven by poverty to migrate, poverty recreated as well as created by capitalism. NAFTA is just a description of the policy of a system where it is free to move the capital from country to country in profits’ search while, on the other hand, this freedom is not given to workers to move from state to country in search of better wages or jobs.

        In his book “Illegal People” the author draws upon his extensive history in reporting on the immigration issues and labor so that several of the nuances of migration could be described to the readers of book that have missed by the people who are not engaged in struggle; the indigenous people’s from areas like Oaxaca, and various of the complex divisions on policy regarding immigration within significant unions of the United States.

        Bacon argues it on page 156 of the book: “labor support for immigrant rights was not based on ideology or morality, but on pragmatic considerations. Immigrants today are the backbone of organizing drives from the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina to Houston janitors and Cintas industrial laundry workers“. It was pleased to find that the important role of migration is included in the book from the Philippines and the union leadership in Chapter 7 of the book “Illegal People or Illegal Work?”

For working people, times are tough, particularly for about 12 million immigrants in the country. As reported in the book, in July, the rate of unemployment reached 5.7 %, and the U.S. is experiencing a recession. In Asia and Africa, people are going to flee looking for the jobs to feed their families, just as Greeks, Germans, Poles, Irish, Italians, Jews, and Russians did in the period from 1840 to 1920. NAFTA has been benefitted to the wealthy nations on both sides of the border, and working people have suffered on both sides of the border.

        Unless some ways have found to end capitalist expansion, migration will keep continuing. The terms and conditions of movement are the critical issues and how current labor markets and labor unions will be affected by migration. The mechanisms and problems need to be understood of this system. Furthermore, the book “Illegal People” puts a face of a human on the debates and discussions over immigration. Activists and other concerned entities should be understanding the IRCA (1986) role, of H2A workers, and of the Bracero Program, among others because, in the current controversies, such programs are being utilized as debating points.

        The interest of progressive movements is common in resisting the current racism’s campaigns and launch of terror against immigrant communities. There is a lot to gain from union solidarity and moving for united workers. And, on the other hand, there is a lot to lose from the oppressive and divisive police state tactics of the Border Patrol and the Immigration Service. The hundreds of more deaths have caused by the militarization of the border of innocent people who were seeking to feed the families, instead of the real reduction in the level of immigration; it shows the failure of this policy. The policy debate’s details are important; however, first, there is a need to understand “how globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants.”

        In his book “Illegal People," Bacon documented how immigrant workers have become a most exploited workforce of the world; this workforce has been subjected to arrests and raids, they are forced to work under miserable conditions that so at low wages, and they have been prevented from organizing themselves in their way.

        Furthermore, Bacon has documented the links between migration, labor, and the global economy. In his book “Illegal People” Bacon has explored the globalization’s human side, exposing the various ways globalization uproots people in Asia and Latin America, driving a human to migrate. The immigration policy of the United States, at the same time, makes the workers of those displaced people a crime in the country. It is explained in “Illegal People” that why the national policy of the United States produces even more migration, more displacement, a more divided, more immigration raids, and polarized society.

       Bacon, via on-the-spot reporting and interviews from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant neighborhoods and workplaces, shown how trade and economic policy of the United States, pursuing to create an investment climate that is favorable for large corporations of the country, creates circumstances to set migration into motion and displace communities. Bacon argues that immigration and trade policy are linked intimately, and are the elements of the same economic system.

Bacon, in particular, analyzes corporate tilt of NAFTA as a cause of migration from Mexico and displacement and shows how employers are being benefitted by criminalizing immigrant labor. Bacon, for example, explains that Oaxacan corn farmers used to receive subsidies for the crops in the absence of NAFTA. CONASUPO markets owned by the state sold corn after turning them into tortillas, along with various basic foodstuffs such as milk, at subsidized and low prices to its people.

    Several things happened after NAFTA: the government of Mexico was forced to eliminate the federal subsidies for corn that made farmers unable to afford it; the system of CONASUPO was dissolved; and the Mexican market was flooded by cheap corn imported from the United States, driving the corn price down sharply in Mexico. Many thousands farming families migrate every year from Mexico because they are unable to sell enough corn to buy food and feed themselves, making the dangerous migration into the United States over the border only to find that working has become a crime for them and to be labeled as "illegal."

    The development of illegal status has powerfully traced by Bacon in his book “Illegal People” that takes immigrants back to slavery, he has shown the cost, that human-bear, of treating an indispensable worker of millions of migrants as well as the migrants themselves, labeled as illegal. It is argued in “Illegal People” that change should take place in the way we debate, think, and legislate around the problems regarding globalization and migration, the author has made a compelled case for why immigration and emigration need to be considered from the perspective of globalized human rights.

    Bacon, in the penetrating investigation of the economic forces and global political creating migration, offers a detailed evaluation of the trends transforming, such as farmers of Mexico into California farm workers. The efforts are condemned by Bacon that criminalize illegal immigrants, noting that debates and immigration proposals of Congress take place outside the discussion of policies of trade that create a migration and displace workers in the first place. Bacon argued on page 68 of his book: “The whole process that creates migrants is scarcely considered in the U.S. immigration debate," positing that migration and displacement are two significantly essential ingredients of the capitalist growth.

According to Bacon, the migration needs are produced by the same system that uses, actually exploits, that migrated labor while the vulnerable undocumented worker status exploits that labor by making it cheap and controllable. Labor advocacy of Bacon is unapologetic with his timely analysis that is enough competent and convincing. Bacon, with his unwavering eye on dignity and rights of working people and in mapping the migrations’ political economy, offers an invaluable corrective to the hobbled discourse of America on immigration and a spur to creative and genuine action.

References of Globalization Creates Migration

Bacon, D. (2008). Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and

Criminalizes Immigrants. Beacon Press.