Trade and Migration

Trade Agreements Lead to Migration

There are many push factors that force and pull factors that entice people to leave their home, community and culture to migrate to foreign lands. Push factors include persecution, conflict, natural disasters and economic hardship. Pull factors include desire for religious and political freedom, tolerance, family unification, and economic opportunity. With a growing gap between the rich and poor and the cost of essential goods increasing in most developing countries, generalized economic growth statistics fail to reflect the hardships of the poor. The situation is made worse when sending countries enter into unjust trade agreements with the U.S. Migration from Mexico to the U.S. has more than doubled since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994. New trade agreements, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), based on this model are likely to have the same effect.

Human Beings Are More than Labor Inputs

Economists speak about the world economy as having two inputs: labor and capital. While U.S. free trade agreements provide legal flexibility and protections for investors to move products and capital across borders, workers face legal restraints in the form of closed borders and temporary migration programs. Temporary migration programs, including guest worker or essential worker programs, are set up to control migration through a convenient faucet that can be easily turned off and on.

Guest worker programs that tie temporary workers’ immigration status to a specific employer lead to a variety of worker abuses. On the sending, side workers take on immense debts to pay recruiters, making them even more vulnerable to abuses for fear of losing their jobs. These programs treat workers as labor inputs in an economic system, and not as human beings with rights, communities and cultures. In the receiving countries, guest worker programs also foster competition among citizen and migrant workers distracting from the real causes of economic hardship, including factory closures, relocations and the corporations responsible for it. Guest worker programs ignore the UN Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families that proposes equality of migrants and their citizens. This convention has been ratified more frequently by sending rather than receiving countries.

This type of guest worker program with key trading partners differs greatly from Europe where the right to free labor mobility from country to country exists throughout the European Union (EU). Recently, the EU expanded to include 10 Central and Eastern European countries. Despite the fact that standard of living variances between the current and new EU members is significantly larger than that in any previous EU expansion, after seven years, there will be full labor mobility. The EU’s experience with a liberal migration policy demonstrates that focusing investment on improving economies in sending countries can be effective in limiting migration while a policy of full labor mobility does not necessarily cause massive waves of permanent migration.

The NAFTA Example

Mexicans were forced to migrate to the U.S. in search of work before NAFTA was enacted in 1994, but the trade pact accelerated the flow. Rather than addressing the causes of this increased migration flow, the US responded by militarizing the border, making migrants more vulnerable and easier to exploit, but ultimately failing to reduce the flow of migrants.

When Mexico fulfilled its NAFTA commitments and removed its controls on corn imports, U.S. corn (over produced because of farm aid and exported at below-market prices) flooded the Mexico market. Unable to compete with large U.S. corporations, 1.7 million small-scale Mexican farmers and workers lost their livelihoods, creating a labor force available to the U.S., Canada and Mexican employers. There are an insufficient number of maquila (export processing factory) jobs that exist at the Mexico-U.S. border to absorb all those displaced from the agricultural sector. These and other trade-related economic factors forced rural workers and other Mexicans to migrate in search of employment. Now Mexico has lost its ability ensure food security for its population. This was evident as demand for biofuel recently drove up corn prices in Mexico making the basic food staple of tortilla unaffordable to low-income families .

Instead of leading all workers toward more economic security, new trade agreements, if crafted like NAFTA, will deepen the economic crisis of already vulnerable working class and rural communities in the U.S. and abroad.

Did you know?

Migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border increased by a staggering 500 percent since 1994, totaling an estimated 3,000 lost lives. (1)

The average immigrant contributes $1,800 more annually than he or she receives in benefits and services provided by the U.S. government. (2)

Globally, remittances by migrants were $72.3 billion in 2001 (3), much more than official levels of global development assistance ($51 billion in 2001).

Trade in Guest Workers Under the WTO

Under the World Trade Organization (WTO), there is a General Agreement in Trade in Services (GATS) where member countries commit to rules and how much they will open their borders to foreign service providers, including water delivery, education, health care, telecommunications, tourism, postal delivery, social security, and insurance. GATS also covers commitments on temporary workers under its Mode 4 section. Currently commitments under Mode 4 cover highly skilled professionals and not low- and medium skilled workers.

Some of the governments in least developed countries in Africa and other regions see cheap labor as their comparative advantage in the global economy and would like to facilitate exporting their services rather than limit themselves to attracting investors to create factories abroad. For this reason they are advocating that wealthy countries expand their commitments to include low and medium-skilled occupations such as construction workers and domestic help. This would amount to a global guest worker program of migrants highly vulnerable to exploitation managed by the World Trade Organization, which has refused to consider labor or human rights as it negotiates agreements on behalf of human beings.

Immigration Policy Ignores the Root Causes

In countries that have no money for a social safety net such as unemployment insurance or food stamps and no resources to subsidize farmers, many people are left with no option but to migrate in search of employment.

Unfortunately, people in receiving countries tend to look for scapegoats as they become more insecure about their own economic livelihood and remain badly informed about the mechanisms behind the changing economy. The immigrant community has borne the brunt of the peoples' fears. In response to this scapegoating, U.S. policymakers have:

Increased detention of immigrants
Increased border patrols at an unprecedented rate
Stripped away U.S. social welfare for immigrants
Increased workplace raids that disrupt the lives of undocumented immigrants and legal residents alike.

This treatment of immigrants in the U.S. is shortsighted and caters to anti-immigrant sentiment while failing to look at the role of U.S. trade and other policies forcing migration.

Contrary to U.S. public opinion, most immigrants add more to the U.S. economy than they take out. Most do not want to leave their homes and migrate, but feel they have no other options.

A New Path is Needed to Eliminate Economic Push Factors of Migration

A fair global trading system that does not lead to forced migration should include the following principles:

Demonstrated coherence between U.S. trade and migration policy.
The ability for people to decide for themselves if they want to migrate, not be forced to do so.
A fair and humane immigration system that upholds the right of families to remain intact, values communities rather than militarizes them, reinforces culture, strengthens basic workers’ rights, and integrates workers into the fabric of society.
Uphold the basic human dignity and rights of migrant workers, and not reduce them to a mere commodity to be traded for economic gain.

Uncovering the Root Causes of Migration:
AFSC's Trade Matters campaign raises awareness of how trade agreements are one of the root causes of migration in order to:

Empower new immigrant community leaders and mobilize immigrants who oppose trade agreements that perpetuate the causes of migration
Increase understanding of the human impacts of the current model of trade agreements that help reduce xenophobia toward immigrants in the US and workers in the Global South
Encourage policymakers to take a more holistic approach to immigration policy