Out of the Woods

The Debate Over Immigration

Most of the time the debaters overlook a number of important facts that bear on this debate.

The central fact is that policies of the US government are to a considerable extent responsible for the flood of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the rest of the hemisphere.

Our government has always felt free to involve itself in the politics of Latin American countries. In the Mexican-American war, we took a large portion of Mexico and incorporated it into our country. Arizona, New Mexico, California were originally part of Mexico. They are now ours.

For 20 years in the early 20th century, the US occupied Nicaragua. After that, our government supported a father and son team of dictators – the Somozas – until they were overthrown by a popular uprising in 1980. Our government responded by instigating the Contra War kept a secret from  Congress and the American people. We have supported dictators in Haiti and elsewhere. The CIA and other branches of the US government were instrumental in overthrowing democratically elected presidents in Guatemala in 1954, and in Chile in 1970, and recently in Honduras to replace them with hard-line conservatives and murderous dictators.

In 1994 under the presidency of Bill Clinton, Canada, the US, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). One result of this treaty was that American corn growers, who are subsidized by the US government and grow corn cheaply because their operations are extensive and mechanized, flooded the market in Mexico with their cheap corn. Most corn in Mexico was grown on small farms without mechanization. The small growers could not compete with the American imported corn and had to go out of business. Small farmers lost their farms and moved to Mexico City only to find unemployment and poverty there. US policies are largely responsible for the waves of impoverished Mexicans seeking a new and better life in our country.

The drug wars are another cause of undocumented immigration. There are several large drug cartels in Mexico at war with each other for the extremely lucrative drug trade to the United States. The drug wars constituted a serious threat to ordinary citizens; 20,000 were killed in Mexico in the last year alone. The US government has tried to suppress the illegal importation of hard drugs to the US. It has armed police and anti-drug units of the Mexican government. The United States also supplies most of the weapons used in the war between government and drug dealers and between the different drug cartels themselves.

The main cause of these drug wars is of course the demand for hard drugs in the United States. Many of our citizens are drug users. Many of them would like to overcome their addiction but there are not enough beds in drug rehabilitation clinics to help everyone who wants to stop using drugs. Instead of providing more drug rehab clinics, our government is spending millions bringing the drug war to Mexico.

It would clearly be much more useful for everyone to help addicts in the US to break their habits and to stop sending arms and anti-drug quasi-military forces into Mexico. We should do all we can to reduce the demand for drugs in the US instead of fanning the flames of drug wars in Mexico.

Our government and US citizens bear major responsibility for the conditions that drive people to walk through the hot desert into the United States.

What is more, impoverished Mexicans and Central Americans who brave the heat, the lack of food and water, the scorpions and snakes, and hostile American militias to cross the border are subject to inhumane treatment if they are apprehended. They are kept sometimes for more than a year in detention centers where the food is rotting, where they have no access to legal advice, where they are cut off from communication with their families. In recent years our government has instituted mass trials, where as many as 70 persons face a judge at the same time and may find themselves send off to prison in a procedure that takes no more than half an hour. These mass trials are a complete travesty of justice and a serious embarrassment for all of us.

If we want to reduce the inflow of people without documents, we need to seriously alter our policies with respect to Mexico and Central America. We need to support democratic governments, not dictators. We need to end exporting our grain to the detriment of local farmers. We need to provide opportunities for drug rehabilitation in the US and stop fomenting drug wars in countries south of us.

If we want to be able to hold up our heads among the nations of this world, we need to treat the people who come across the border with respect and compassion. If we want to punish them for their border crossing, they need to face courts with the same rights as American citizens. There should be no place in our country for concentration camps and mere caricatures of legal proceedings.