What does security actually mean as billions are funneled into walls and armed agents? And a historian explains the complicated story behind the new binational Tijuana River agreement.
I have been trying to summarize the immigration and border issue from my experience of the border, going back to the mid 1970s. It is complex, so the problem is to make it make sense quickly, before people’s eyes glaze over. If the number 11 million is used to refer to the mass of illegal immigrants, it has to be seen as an attempt to pull a number out of the air. It could represent an estimate of the size of the overall exodus of Latino immigrants over about the past hundred years. To me, this period of time is defined by the rise of American billionaire investors, multinational corporations and big international banks as players in the economies of the various countries south of the US border. The power of these players was to overwhelm local communities and national governments in order to take land away from indigenous subsistence farmers for amassing large land parcels for agribusiness to reap large scale profits from large scale marketing to corporate consumers. The dispossessed indigenous people found that they could not oppose this trend, so they were forced to go north. As migrant farm labor they represented a win/win for the corporate agribusiness overlords. But the numbers of Latinos became an issue with the bigots. The billionaire class got ahead of this by playing the migrants against the bigots. No one is telling this story, so it is a satisfactory game of politics that is in perpetual motion. Americans mostly want coffee and bananas cheap and the products of the maquiladeros stocking the shelves. Getting too deep into why this is happening is a story never told. The solution is simple. The US government should go down to the various countries and set up a trade pattern that involves local indigenous workers seeing more benefit from their labor or their land. Given that the current situation took decades to develop, it should be recognized that it might take decades to create a balanced situation. The approach currently favored, to punish the poor migrants, only works as a classic public whipping of the poor by the rich.
Thank you Stuart for your comment. And it is a complex issue that's difficult to quickly summarize as you say. There are historians, journalists and others writing about these issues in depth. I'm a big fan of historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez and definitely recommend her work https://latino.ucla.edu/person/kelly-lytle-hernandez/
I have been trying to summarize the immigration and border issue from my experience of the border, going back to the mid 1970s. It is complex, so the problem is to make it make sense quickly, before people’s eyes glaze over. If the number 11 million is used to refer to the mass of illegal immigrants, it has to be seen as an attempt to pull a number out of the air. It could represent an estimate of the size of the overall exodus of Latino immigrants over about the past hundred years. To me, this period of time is defined by the rise of American billionaire investors, multinational corporations and big international banks as players in the economies of the various countries south of the US border. The power of these players was to overwhelm local communities and national governments in order to take land away from indigenous subsistence farmers for amassing large land parcels for agribusiness to reap large scale profits from large scale marketing to corporate consumers. The dispossessed indigenous people found that they could not oppose this trend, so they were forced to go north. As migrant farm labor they represented a win/win for the corporate agribusiness overlords. But the numbers of Latinos became an issue with the bigots. The billionaire class got ahead of this by playing the migrants against the bigots. No one is telling this story, so it is a satisfactory game of politics that is in perpetual motion. Americans mostly want coffee and bananas cheap and the products of the maquiladeros stocking the shelves. Getting too deep into why this is happening is a story never told. The solution is simple. The US government should go down to the various countries and set up a trade pattern that involves local indigenous workers seeing more benefit from their labor or their land. Given that the current situation took decades to develop, it should be recognized that it might take decades to create a balanced situation. The approach currently favored, to punish the poor migrants, only works as a classic public whipping of the poor by the rich.
Thank you Stuart for your comment. And it is a complex issue that's difficult to quickly summarize as you say. There are historians, journalists and others writing about these issues in depth. I'm a big fan of historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez and definitely recommend her work https://latino.ucla.edu/person/kelly-lytle-hernandez/