To whit: If small farmers in Mexico cannot make a living growing food for their families and communities because they are being undercut by the “cheap” commodities flooding their markets from the subsidized, highly mechanized and fossil fuel intensive mega conglomerates from the north (which are also putting our own family farmers out of business) they must migrate to the cities to find work in factories (under unsafe, unhealthy and poorly paid conditions). When those factories move to Asia to find even cheaper labor they must migrate again, farther north to find work in fields and plants, often owned by or supplying the very conglomerates that put them out of business at home. They are now in a country where they have no rights to organize and would risk deportation if they tried to. At this point they inevitably become, at least potentially, competitors with lower skilled, whether black, white or “other”, labor communities for jobs, with the resulting tensions between those communities.

Those on the left who see this strictly as a human rights issue seem to fail to understand that under these conditions, the human rights of one group are too easily played off against those of another in this country – if some win, others will, perforce, lose no matter how lofty the rhetoric to the contrary. How do you convince natives of a country that, in a land of shrinking employment, they must agree to increase the already high economic pressure on themselves in the name of human rights for others when their own rights are being steadily and palpably eroded every day?

Those on the right may, or may not, grant that immigrants are coming out of need but say that it is not the duty of tax paying Americans to take care of Mexico’s (for example) people, that their own government is responsible. What they fail to acknowledge is that these same taxpaying Americans put in office the folks who enacted the policies (free trade deals) that forced people to become immigrants in the first place and the best way to keep people from migrating is to facilitate, or at the very least not impede, the ability of people to make a decent living with dignity, in their own land. No one comes out of the womb wanting to leave the place of their birth, their culture, their ancestors. People migrate because they must to survive and when survival is the motive, no walls or patrols or radar will keep them out. It is short sighted if not downright perverse to pursue policies that induce, even necessitate, immigration, then blame the immigrants for their plight.

Both sides are using arguments that are bound to produce tensions. If the human rights community would expand their vision a bit and understand that human rights for immigrants includes a “right of return” not just for their labor in this country, but in their own and that our trade policies are destroying that right….. If the blue collar community (and increasingly the white collar community as it faces more competition from H2B workers) would understand that they have a great deal in common with these immigrants – the corporate free trade community is destroying all our livelihoods and pitting us against each other as part of the process…..

If the “little people” (i.e. 99.9% of us in the US) would put the pieces together, we might perhaps understand that we must begin to use the “P” word – protectionism – sever it from “isolationism” (always attached to it like a Siamese twin by the corporate defenders of “free trade”) and realize that protecting our right to economic security in our “homeland” perforce requires that, at the very least, we do not infringe on that right for others in theirs, and that, in fact, it is time to recycle that “Think Globally, Act Locally” slogan whereby the people of every locale, region, nation state are “protected” from the economic infringements of other localities, regions etc. Every state must have the right to restrict trade to protect and strengthen the livelihoods of its own people so they never need to migrate. In fact, one could argue that every state has the responsibility to do so. And the gist of our foreign policy would be to facilitate the transfer of appropriate technology and assistance to all peoples in their quest to be economically secure in their “homelands”.

Is this something you could discuss? Or maybe at least you could check out Ha-Joon Chang’s book “Bad Samaritans”. (Great discussion would be with Vandana Shiva and Ha-Joon Chang!?