Fact is, most immigrants don't want to come to the US, or to Europe, at all. When they do migrate north, they do so overwhelmingly out of dire necessity, with no remaining livelihood back home and often times a spouse and small children whose well-being would be in doubt were they not to make the momentous choice to emigrate. Think about it: would you want to leave the place you grew up, leave your whole family behind, to go pick strawberries or work in meat-packing for low wages in often dangerous conditions? Hardly bloody likely.

But what causes this dire necessity? Often, it is helped along by the same trade liberalization often popularized by American "liberals" like Tom Friedman. Nations negotiate bilateral and multilateral trade liberalization agreements, often under the auspices of the WTO or similar regional umbrella organizations. Multi-national corporations whose lobbyists crafted those agreements on behalf of member governments go on to take advantage of the very agreements they've negotiated. And those on the short end of the stick? Poor farmers and laborers in Africa, in under-developed Asia and in Latin America. And, of course, working class folks in the developed world.

This may be old hat to many, but a good reminder of the dynamic underlying how Capital sets out to undermine migrants and workers simulatenously can be found in the new issue of  NLR, (subscription only, excerpt provided below).

Deregulation's costs

Contrary to the dogma of the labour-market deregulators, unemployment levels in any given country depend far more on the organization of international trade and on company law than on local labour legislation. The notion that a reform of the labour law will create jobs is an illusion: the complete abrogation of all regulatory norms applicable to wage labour would have scant impact on unemployment. Witness the situation of the self-employed, excluded from wage-labour regulations, but subject to those of international trade. A typical instance of self-employment is the food and agriculture sector, which switched almost overnight from the `archaic' pattern of peasant smallholdings to an ultramodern model, integrated within international production and distribution networks...

We are constantly told we need to work longer hours, be more flexible about working week-ends, accept lower pay or cuts to benefits or working conditions, all in an effort to "boost employment." But this is a load of crap. Fact of the matter is the agricultural sector of the workforce, one of the most deregulated sectors as it exists in most Western countries with the vast majority of the labor force essentially self-employed. Needless to say, the sector hasn't exactly seen employment growth in the past few generations.

 A part of this sector lives off the Common Agricultural Policy (another neglected aspect of employment law), but other farm businesses receive no subsidy at all. This is the case, for example, with the battery-farming of poultry, which has been intensively developed since the early 1980s. The method is industrial (25 birds per square metre, massive reliance on antibiotics, etc), the product is tasteless, and the pollution is huge (ground-water poisoned by nitrates), but the--apparent--costs are low. The system is organized into networks on the basis of bilateral contracts signed between the food giants that dominate the world market and the breeders whom they control, from one end of the production chain to the other. This is the sort of `social paradise' of which the advocates of labour deregulation dream: no minimum wage, no limit to the working day, no right to strike, no collective agreements.  

The evolution of such a sector offers a concrete example of the impact on employment were labour regulations to be completely abolished. The battery-chicken industry initially underwent a period of vertiginous growth, exporting within Europe and beyond; the number of poultry farmers rose accordingly. Before long, the food corporations moved into developing countries where costs were lower (Brazil, Thailand, China) and began to re-import products from there into Europe, thus exerting pressures for increased productivity and lower margins on the European breeders. In terms of jobs, however, the most destructive effects of the free circulation of frozen chickens were felt in Africa. Here, poultry markets had been shielded from excessive competition by the 1975 Lomé Accords, signed between the EU and the ACP countries (Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific). Thus protected, a small cottage industry of quality poultry, sold live, had begun to flourish.

Once completed, deregulated agricultural markets commence a race toward the bottom in terms of environmental and quality standards commences. Pressure is put on distributors too deny a difference between their inferior product and product raised by more natural means. Farmers in the deregulated home countries come to suffer as production is logically shifted to lower-cost parts of the globe, though this is in some countries (in Europe via the CAP) mitigated to some extent.

But the real damage is inflicted on the more vulnerable farmers in developing nations far afield, once their markets have been forced open and deregulated as well:

These protections were removed in 2000 under the Cotonou Accords, in compliance with WTO rules, opening the floodgates to the mass importation of frozen chicken pieces of the kind scorned by northern consumers (necks, wings, parson's nose). Sold for next to nothing and in poor sanitary conditions thanks to the rupturing of the `cold chain', these imports were mere surplus profit for the multinationals, whose trade in `choice cuts' for the north yielded huge returns; but their effect was to wipe out the local industry. Ruined poultry farmers swelled the stream of African workers compelled to emigrate by the breakdown of local economies. In Europe, the avalanche of `choice cuts' of frozen chicken from Thailand or Brazil threw Breton poultry farming into crisis, as profit margins shrank and more jobs were lost. Predicated on the excessively low cost of transport--itself a function of the deregulation of maritime labour--the globalization of the poultry circuit also increased the chance of a major health disaster, by `globalizing' the risk of avian flu.  

Obesity for workers in Europe and the Americas, Salmonella for workers and small-holders in the Developing world, and of course, profits for Capital.

Such exemplary enforcement of an international division of labour, based on the exploitation of local advantage, could take place thanks to the reforms to international trade rules pushed through after the implosion of Communism. Reversing the juridical principles established in the postwar period, these have facilitated the development of a free-market dogmatism whose effects are as destructive to independent or `informal' workers as to salaried employees, in both North and South.  

Insert corn and produce for poultry, and you've just described what's happened to large swathes of the countryside in Latin America, and why parts of your city are taking on an increasing Hispanophone flavor to them. And it ain't just Dubya that's at fault. All of the cheerleaders of trade liberalism, from Tom Friedman to John Micklethwait in passing by Lou Dobbs (when he's not going after the Buchanan crowd as he is of late), have a hand in this, as do you, I, our 401Ks and the firms they invest in.

The Lou Dobb's of the world, while they're not out there fulfilling their role as pitchmen for American capitalism, find secondary employment in playing to the fears of those vulnerable to it. In so doing, they undermine the natural human bonds we share with those vulnerable among us by focusing our attention on a convenient bugbear, in this case illegals, instead of the real culprit undermining the economic security of each and every one of us, Mexican, African, European, American: Unregulated global capitalism, pushed forward by ever increasing deregulation of world-wide labor standards, of fair trade practices and of predatory market behavior which destroys the livelihood of workers and small-holders alike.

We're all in this together, it was true before and it is still true. Just somebody try telling the Lou Dobbs of this world that.