killer buffalo

Tea Parties.  Pirates.  Crisis in the New World.  It’s 1773: do you know where your slave labor is?

Perhaps the recent turbulences are just an episode of déjà vu, but they seem to have President Obama forgetting the past; on Tuesday, he appointed Alan Bersin to chairman of a United States-Mexico border task-force, a position otherwise known as “Border Czar,” despite that Mr Bersin failed at the same job thirteen years ago and that the job probably wouldn’t still exist had he succeeded.

Among Mr Bersin’s responsibilities—some new and some renewed—is commissioning the construction of the seven-hundred mile two-fence barrier called for in the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Although Mr Obama voted for the Act, he did so with hesitation, admitting that “as an answer to the problem of illegal immigration [the Act was] unfinished at best.”  Since then, evidence has surfaced that similar fences don’t deter illegal immigration, but instead divert it; the completion of a federally-funded three-hundred-fifty mile fence along New Mexico’s and Arizona’s borders with Mexico, two years ago, has shifted immigration routes to the Sonoran Desert, where more than one-thousand bodies have been found since 2005.

And yet Mr Bersin’s reappointment indicates that Mr Obama is firm in his commitment to the boundary fences, as if saying “it worked for the Ming Dynasty in 500 BC; why not us, now?”

Even if the barrier reduces illegal border crossings, it’s unlikely that it will decrease drug-related violence and it certainly won’t decrease the poverty that causes illegal border crossings.  The $1.2 billion granted to the Department of Homeland Security in the Secure Fence Act could be used more effectively than to quarantine North America’s poverty.  Were it invested in Mexico’s growing heavy industry sector, it could create jobs that could build a more viable Mexican economy: better economy, less incentive to immigrate, fewer immigrants.

That was the logic sixteen years ago when President Clinton and the 103rd Congress approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty outlawing tariffs in all North American transactions.  Since the treaty was passed the rate of poverty in Mexico has dropped from 41% to 21%, and previously increasing immigration rates have flattened.

NAFTA could have been more successful if Congress had ended its subsidies. But since true free-trade would leave many American farmers without work, every Congress since the treaty’s passage has voted to continue the farm subsidies that behave like a tariff, deflating the cost of producing agricultural goods in America.  With the help of Mexico’s lack of import taxes—as imposed by NAFTA—American crops have flooded the Mexican marketplace and driven most Mexican farmers further into poverty, even though Mexican farmers could have, if also given tax dollars by their home country, produced certain fruits more efficiently than Americans.

Instead, migrant workers in Mexico illegally traverse the border during the spring and labor on California’s dairy, artichoke and avocado farms, pear fields, apple orchards, and orange groves, before returning to their homes after the harvest.  By providing annual subsidies to farms that employ migrant workers at less than minimum wage, Congress is importing a supply of seasonal jobs that would otherwise be located in Mexico.  Apply Say’s Law—that supply creates its own demand—and it follows that such jobs produce the demand that attracts workers over the border.

The larger the supply of immigrant workers, the larger the concentration of farms that develops, creating a greater demand for workers, creating a greater supply of them, creating a greater concentration of farms.  ¿Como se dice “vicious cycle?”

Mr Obama meets with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Thursday, and it’s likely Mr Calderon will ask him some difficult questions, like why did Congress decide to erect a wall along the Mexican border thirteen years after it vowed for an economic alliance?  Or, just as importantly, why is America looking to a man that failed in the 1990s—Mr Bersin—for solutions at the present or looking to a 1773 solution—a wall—to a 21st century problem?

It’s 2009, and Congress knows where its slave labor is, where it creeps through the border—not in Texas where the fence is being constructed but in Tijuana—and where it works and how it works.  The 111th Congress, like the one before it and the one before that, knows how to get the most out of its slave labor without paying it “minimum wage” or funding its health care or Social Security.  Congress knows how to keep American farmers happy, how to waste $1.2 billion, and how to treat the symptoms of poverty without eliminating it.

-David Lamb

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