Now, think about free trade agreements and that just-mentioned issue of immigration. Obviously, it has become a free trade sore point both here and in the United Kingdom. However, immigration pain has originated from opposite but intimately related sources.
Within the boundaries of the EU, the immigrant problem has stemmed from the earlier-listed "four freedoms," while in North and Central America it comes precisely from the fact that only three of those freedoms are honored.
More specifically, the EU free trade arrangement recognizes that provision of goods and services essentially involves both capital and labor as roughly equal partners. Consequently, if a treaty allows free movement of capital across borders, justice and the logic of capitalism demands that it also permit similar liberty to labor which is as essential to the free market equation as capital. So, borders must be permeable to immigrants from one member-country to another.
This recognition has led to major relocations of population across frontiers that were closed in the pre-EU world. Movements of this sort have occurred with a vengeance in Great Britain, whose borders have long been open to immigrants from the country's former colonies, e.g. India and Pakistan. Add to these the climate and war refugees who have also found safety in Europe in general including Great Britain, and you'll begin to understand why many there might blame their growing sense of lost national identity exclusively on the European Union. Boris Johnson has given effective voice to such discontent.
Similar unhappiness with the NAFTA and CAFTA has surfaced in North and Central America.
However, there the pinch of globalization is caused by closed rather than open borders.
That is, while NAFTA and CAFTA allow free movement of goods, services, and capital across the borders of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the countries of Central America, they deny such freedom of movement to labor. Consequently, the agreements have at their disposal a captive labor force. So, while capital can go wherever it finds low wages, Mexican labor for instance cannot freely move to high wage areas in the United States or Canada. This has been a source of great frustration (and poverty) for workers under NAFTA and CAFTA.
As a result, Latinix workers have taken matters into their own hands. In what some have called a modern reconquista (a reconquering or reclaiming) of lands confiscated from Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have ignored one-sided laws prohibiting labor's mobility. Regardless of the consciousness behind them, their actions implicitly insist that if capital is allowed to move freely across borders, so should labor be permitted cross-border transit.
Such economic rebels added to victims of climate change and of U.S. wars in Central America during the 1980s comprise the immigrant multitudes that President Trump has blamed for U.S. economic problems. In reality, they represent the collateral damage of free trade pacts as much as do their counterparts in the European Union.
(In other words, despite Trump's assertions, it is right wing capitalists not liberals or progressives who insist on absolutely open southern borders however, for themselves, but not for workers.)
Reforming Free Trade
So, what's the answer to the EU, NAFTA, and CAFTA conundrums? Is it abandonment of free trade agreements altogether? Not necessarily. (And this brings us to the implications of reform involved in last week's vote.)
In a word, the answer is DEMOCRACY.
That is, the defects of free trade agreements can only be remedied satisfactorily by democratizing them to protect jobs, cultures, and local social values.
To begin with, democracy demands that all stakeholders (not merely corporate representatives, lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians) be present at the renegotiating conference table. This includes trade unionists, environmentalists, and groups representing the specific rights of indigenous peoples, women and children. All those affected must have equal voice and vote. Nothing else will work. Nothing else is just.
Yet, if all stakeholders have voice and vote, they will predictably complicate matters. (Democracy, remember, is messy.) Predictably, they'll make demands that will radically restrain the freedoms of the corporations involved even to the point of rendering unworkable the type of trade pacts we've come to know.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
