In the contemporary world, large-scale movements of people are a function of the accelerated process of global integration. These migrations are not isolated phenomena: in nearly all cases, movements of goods and capital give rise to movements of people. Global cultural exchange, facilitated by improved transportation and the proliferation of print and electronic media, has also led to immigration. International migration has grown in volume and significance since 1945, particularly since the mid-1980s. Immigration will likely continue to grow in the 21st century, and may be one of the most important factors in global change. World population growth and the increasing gap between rich and poor countries encourage poor citizens to emigrate, legally or not, hoping to better their living standards and those of their families. Political conflicts also produce refugee flows. Taken together, these factors lead to increasing movements of people from south to north and east to west.
Without question, the problem of immigration is a global problem. Despite the fact that there are currently 150 million migrants on a planet with a population of over five billion people, the impact of immigration is much larger than its relatively small numbers might suggest. Immigration can have considerable consequences for economic and social relations in the area of origin. For emigrants, the choice of destination country is closely tied to employment opportunities, which are most often concentrated in industrial and urban areas. The impact on the receiving community is also considerable. Immigration, therefore, affects not only the emigrant, but also the sending and receiving societies as a whole. In fact, there are few people in today's industrialized or developing countries who have not experienced personally the effects of immigration.
These migratory flows also have important economic impacts. According to the International Organization on Migration (IOM), in 1980 foreign workers sent US$67 billion annually to their various places of origin. The International Monetary Fund reported that in 1997, remittances sent by foreign workers reached US$77 billion. For some national economies, these remittances can be as important to the Gross Domestic Product as exports. In El Salvador, for example, remittances exceed the total value of exports. In the Dominican Republic they are equivalent to more than half of exports, and even in Mexico (with some US$10 billion annually), remittances are first in net foreign exchange, although there is trade deficit, and in recent years they have been higher than income from tourism. It is estimated that Latin America receives some US$25 billion yearly in remittances. Statistically, this work force is second only to petroleum in importance within the global market. In Mexico, for example, remittances are just 20 percent lower than petroleum exports.
Although many countries in the hemisphere are dealing with immigration-related issues, U.S. immigration policy has attracted the most attention, even though the United States is the destination of only about one percent of global immigrants each year. U.S. policy is designed to attract more skilled immigrants (currently, the majority of those who attempt to immigrate to the United States are "unskilled") and to supply a large, inexpensive, and strictly controlled work force for certain U.S. industries (particularly agribusiness growers, canneries and packaging plants, certain manufacturers such as clothing, and the service industry).
Understanding U.S. immigration policy is important in the FTAA context because the United States is attempting to regionalize and globalize this policy. For example, U.S. policies against organized crime (which includes issues related to undocumented immigration), as well as policies against terrorism, both of which were strengthened by new measures implemented in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001, have been globalized and contribute to the military manifestations of U.S. hegemony. The incorporation of new functions to be carried out by the U.S. government's Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Border Patrol as part of the new Department of Homeland Security (which is set to begin on 1 January 2003), and the establishment of "Smart Borders" among the United States, Canada and Mexico, which will create a "Security Perimeter" in North America (creating a "United States Fortress" similar to the "European Union Fortress"), are all intended not just to limit migrant's mobility but also citizens' individual liberties. Flows of undocumented workers, however, will continue to arrive at this country in spite of those measures, as they have done over the past decade in spite of such programs as "prevention by dissuasion" (metal fences, electronic sensors, more guards, etc. in the so-called "Operation Hold the Line" in El Paso, Texas in 1993, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego in 1994, Operation Safeguard in Arizona in 1997, and Operation Rio Grande in MacAllen, Texas in 1997). According to recent analyses by experts, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has increased to higher levels than those that existed in the period before the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 (also called the Simpson-Rodino Law).
For some time the United States has pushed certain strategies to regulate immigration (particularly of the undocumented kind) in its immediate geographic realm, principally through the following three initiatives:
Thus, in the process of transnationalizing the neoliberal economic model, the elite technocrats who support this model and unjustly hold tremendous power are in league with local officials who have agreed to impose similar immigration measures. In these affairs, the Mexican government has thus far been the biggest collaborator. Along with the U.S. government, Mexico has declared that NAFTA, by itself, will solve the Mexican emigration problem in the long term. In fact, this position was tactically accepted before the NAFTA negotiations began, as a result of the conclusions of the International Commission for the Study of Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, created by the U.S. government in 1986 in the wake of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA-86). This was the greatest effort since 1965 to establish economic mechanisms to regulate immigration to the United States.
Between 1988 and 1990, the Commission held a series of public hearings and investigations by specialists from the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, focusing on forming responses to two major issues: a) the conditions that contribute to unauthorized emigration of persons from Western Hemisphere countries to the United States; and b) economic development initiatives that could be taken cooperatively to alleviate the pressures that cause emigration from the sending countries. The Ascenio Commission, as it is still known, presented recommendations in 1990 that, according to the Commission's president, were well received on the part of the involved governments. The conclusions declare that:
"1. Despite other important factors, the search for economic opportunity is the principal motivation of the majority of unauthorized migration to the United States.
2. While economic growth leading to the creation of jobs is the ultimate solution to reduce the rate of migration, the process of economic development itself will stimulate short and mid-term emigration, thus creating expectations and facilitating the migratory capacity of people. Development and the availability of new and better jobs in the country, however, is the only manner in which migratory pressures may be reduced over time."
The Commission was convinced that extensive trade between the emigrant-source countries and the United States would solve the problem. This created the basis for eliminating the immigration issue from economic and trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere. As a result, workers from emigration-source countries are left to feel the consequences of U.S. policies, instituted either unilaterally or in cooperation with other governments, to regulate and control immigration flows.
Starting in February 2001, the U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to negotiate a new migration policy (which was temporarily interrupted by the September 11 attacks). The Mexican government proposed that, in exchange for increased legal avenues for Mexicans to work in the United States (a guest worker program, an increased number of permanent visas, greater protections for undocumented workers, and a still undefined system to "regularize" the three and one half million undocumented Mexican workers), Mexico was prepared to establish strict controls, including the use of the military, to limit migratory flows from the south so that they not arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. These measures are intended to regulate the North American labor market utilizing cheap Mexican labor as a comparative advantage at the regional level (Canada, the United States and Mexico, in the latter case mainly through the maquiladora industry). It is also designed to regulate the Central American labor market utilizing the cheap labor force in southern and southeastern Mexico and Central America, which would principally be employed in maquiladora industries and other large productive projects in the so-called Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). This Plan is a neoliberal strategy to exploit natural resources and energy, as well as the region's cheap labor, and to construct a bridge between North and South America to facilitate the creation of the FTAA.
The fact that migrant workers have successfully been left out of NAFTA, under the assumption that free trade itself will permit the long-term generation of employment and improvement in living conditions of potential migrants, keeping them in their country of origin, has been the basis for the implementation of those policies. The U.S. government, while it is not obligated to negotiate any specific immigration treaties or accords with Mexico or any other nation, has enjoyed the freedom to seek the regulation of immigration flows into its territory, beginning formally with Mexico and Central America, but extending to the rest of the hemisphere through the creation of the FTAA.
This strategy, if implemented, would end the incipient efforts of some countries that have attempted to form regional blocs permitting the free movement of goods and labor. The Andean Pact, which was formalized in 1969 among Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, and reactivated in 1989, was the first to explicitly include direct treatment of this issue. Two conventions have attempted to find common ground on immigration: 1) the Simón Rodríguez Convention, signed in 1973; and 2) the Andean Migration Statute, created as part of the efforts to strengthen this regional group in the Cartagena Agreements Commission of 1977.
The second agreement was presented as an effort to implement the principles postulated in the first accord. This came about as the result of efforts by employment agencies that worked to help migrants find jobs. Unfortunately, these provisions benefited skilled workers, who did not represent the majority of the immigration flow. In October 1992, in a meeting of the Governing Board of the Cartagena Agreement held in Bogota, Colombia, governments agreed to work toward the design of concrete legal measures and joint actions to give new momentum to the treatment of international labor immigration issues on a regional level. This agreement, however, has still produced no concrete results.
The other case in which immigration has been included is the Mercosur, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. According to the text of the March 1991 Treaty of Asunción, a common market was supposed to go into effect in January 1995, which would entail the free circulation of goods, services, capital and labor under a common external tariff. However, in January 1994, one year before the end of the transition period, the governments ratified the original timeframes, but only to achieve a customs union, rather than a common market. Even this objective seemed ambitious at the time, in light of the change in the international context that occurred in 1994, especially for Argentina, given the fall in capital markets.
In the 1990s, the migration process increased in these two blocs due to the economic crises that affected them and that have deepened in South America, particularly in Argentina. Countries that have traditionally received immigrants (Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela) now both receive and send them. There are more than two million Brazilians living abroad, of which half are in the United States and some 300,000 in Japan. Those migrants currently send two billion dollars a year to their communities. Thousands of Argentines are migrating to the United States, and those that have Spanish or Italian roots are migrating to Europe. According to the Peruvian government, there are more than two million Peruvians abroad, of which 75 percent are undocumented. Between 250 and 300 thousand Peruvians a year currently migrate to Argentina, Chile, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United States. The situation in Ecuador is similar; more than 290,000 Ecuadorians have left their country in 2000 and 2001, headed for Europe and the United States. There are 300,000 Ecuadorians in Spain, half of whom are undocumented.
With the plan to form the FTAA already underway, the conditions for the insertion of Latin American countries appear to be similar to the conditions imposed on Mexico when it entered NAFTA. The United States seems to want to impose on the FTAA the model followed under NAFTA, under which, as previously mentioned, labor immigration was not included under the assumption that free trade would solve the immigration problem over the long term.
As we have seen, the issue of labor migration has been either completely absent in the subregional integration efforts in the Americas, or it has been dealt with on paper agreements without developing concrete actions for implementation (as in the Andean Pact and Mercosur); and it will be included only in a very limited and tangential manner in the FTAA. Meanwhile, domestic and international migration flows continue to grow throughout the hemisphere, but under increasingly difficult circumstances for workers, especially those who seek to insert themselves into labor markets in some developed countries, where increasingly restrictive legal measures - in many cases racist and discriminatory -- are being established for foreigners.
U.S. national immigration policies, while designed to "control" immigration, are insufficient even on the regional level to confront the rapid transnational economic changes that lead to the displacement of populations and to international migration due to economic pressures and social and ethnic conflicts. Recognizing this, immigrants' rights organizations throughout the world are taking important steps to confront the international dimensions of immigration, developing diverse mechanisms to defend immigrants' full rights. These include the Canadian Open the Borders Network, the U.S. National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Enlaces Regionales (which includes U.S., Mexican and Central American members), and the Mesoamerican Social Forum against Plan Puebla Panama. In the rest of the hemisphere, the South American Network to Defend Migrants, Refugees and Displaced Peoples was created during the First South American Civil Society Meeting on Migration, held in Quito, Ecuador on 14 to 16 August 2002.
It is important to examine the immigration issue within the framework of hemispheric regionalization, as the developed countries' national immigration policies have tended to be applied unilaterally and extraterritorially throughout the hemisphere.
a) the modification of immigration, anti-terrorism and other laws (nearly all of which were approved in 1996) that criminalize the migrant labor force, limiting its access to services and submitting it to greater exploitation, discrimination and violence;
b) the repeal of "employer sanctions" such as those adopted in the 1986 U.S. Immigration Control and Reform Act (The Simpson-Rodino Law), which prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers and requires the verification of authorization to work in the United States from those newly hired;
c) the immediate legalization (through a proclamation of Amnesty) of undocumented workers within their borders;
d) the demilitarization of borders (such as the U.S.-Mexico border) that have been reinforced under the pretext of preventing the entry of terrorists and reducing the flows of undocumented workers and drugs; and
e) the implementation of measure to limit the use of force by migration agents, border patrols and other military and political bodies.