5-18-06, 9:27 am

As Bush continues to troll for votes to shore up Republicans in the November elections, the immigration debate moves further away from any informed discussion of why workers uproot themselves and make treacherous journeys to other countries, only to take miserable jobs with employers who exploit them in every imaginable way.

The answers to the questions that underpin the U.S. immigration controversy are readily available but ignored by Republicans who feed off racial and ethnic tensions.

The U.S./Canada border is longer and less protected than the U.S./Mexico border, but few Republicans ask why Canadians do not flood across it to the U.S.

Around the world, unemployment and poverty drive workers to migrate from the developing countries to the richer nations.

More than half of the 10 million to 12 million immigrants with irregular status in the U.S. are Mexican. Every year, more than 400 Mexicans die trying to cross the U.S. border, according to the Mexican consulate.

In Mexico, per capita GDP in 2005 was $10,100, compared with $42,000 in the U.S. Forty percent of the Mexican population lives in poverty, compared with 12 percent of the population in the U.S., according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.

Mexican immigrants in the U.S. send an estimated $16 billion a year back to their families to try to pull them out of poverty.

A growing number of the immigrants who cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. are originally from Guatemala, where 2005 per capita GDP was $5,200 and 75 percent of the population lives in poverty.

The Hondurans who cross Mexico to the U.S. are leaving a nation where 53 percent of the population lives in poverty and the annual per capita GDP was only $2,800 in 2005.

Immigration is not an American problem but a global one, which needs a global solution.

According to the United Nations (UN), 60 percent of all immigration represents people moving from poor developing nations to richer developed nations.

According to the International Labor Organization, 185 million people around the world are unemployed, and 550 million workers earn less than $1 a day.

Half of the world’s 2.8 billion workers earn less than $2 a day.

In many developing countries, more than half of the workers are employed in the informal sector of the economy, where working conditions and wages are totally unregulated.

Over the past decade, the industrialized nations are the only ones to experience falling unemployment rates. In every other region, unemployment either remained stable or increased.

Global immigration is rising rapidly because income differentials around the world are widening. The UN has concluded that because most immigrants move to escape poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor nations will generate ever-larger numbers of immigrants.

The number of immigrants worldwide rose from 82 million in 1970 to 175 million in 2000 to 200 million in 2005.

According to the UN, migrants who move from low-income to high-income countries are often able to gain an income that is 20 to 30 times higher than they would be able to gain at home, moving from abject poverty to a sustainable existence.

In addition to immigrants who move to support themselves, the World Bank estimates that immigrants send home about $150 billion a year through formal channels to help family members survive, plus an estimated $300 billion transferred informally.

The global labor force will increase from 3.0 billion in 2001 to 3.4 billion by 2010, an average increase of 40 million per year, with 38 million of that annual growth coming from the developing nations and only 2 million from the developed nations, according to the World Bank.

Half of the workers in the developing nations are small farmers who live in poverty. The world’s richer countries spend more than $300 billion a year in agricultural subsidies, more than six times the amount they spend on overseas aid. This subsidization policy makes it impossible for small farmers to make a living and drives an increasing number of them to migrate to the developed nations.

The UN, the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO) have all offered detailed solutions to the immigration problem, including humane immigration policies, increased foreign aid and assistance to the developing nations, and trade policies that allow workers and farmers in developing nations to make a decent living. Pursuing these policies would cost far less than the Bush move to criminalize immigrants and wall up the borders.



From Labor Research Association