Trump and the NAFTA Effect

David Bacon: Trade policies are very much bipartisan. NAFTA was negotiated under the [George HW] Bush administration, the Clinton administration pushed it through Congress, then we saw the Bush II administration follow the same policies. These are all trade policies designed to enhance the profits of corporations and that is not going to change. So long as both parties are serving those interests, nothing is going to change.

The only person in the political establishment who has had anything different to say is Bernie Sanders. He said that a corporation that was responsible for relocating jobs should not be entitled to bid on federal contracts. That would obviously have an enormous impact on a company like General Motors.

Dennis Bernstein: How does forced migration happen? In the corporate media it is portrayed as all these people wanting to get the good life in the United States. But this is not really going on.

David Bacon: Let's take the corn farmers in Mexico as an example. When NAFTA was passed it pulled down the barriers that had been in place to prevent US corporations from dumping produce in Mexico. So Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and the Continental Grain Company took subsidies that Congress gave them in the Farm Bill and used them to subsidize their sale of corn in Mexico. They were selling corn at 19% below their own cost of production. They were trying to drive Mexican producers out of the market.

Remember that the cultivation of corn started in Oaxaca. The first domesticated corn was found in a cave outside Oaxaca City. So we owe the fact that we are able to eat corn at all to these communities.

Under NAFTA, 3 million farmers had to leave home and look for work elsewhere. They went to Mexico City, they became workers in maquiladoras [manufacturing operations], in the export farms in Baja, California, and here in the United States. The number of farm workers in California rose from about 20,000 to about 165,000 during the period of NAFTA. In fact, they have become an enormous part of the farm labor workforce all along the Pacific Coast.

In many ways, this is a very sad story. These communities were the ones who started corn cultivation. These are very stable communities going back many thousands of years. People don't get up and move for the fun of it. It takes the forces of survival to get people to leave.

Not all the consequences for us in the United States have been bad. For instance, workers coming from Oaxaca have been the source of a movement to organize farm workers. We now have a union of farmworkers in Washington state that was formed by workers from Oaxaca. Here in California at a blueberry farm near Delano about 500 workers organized themselves into a union. The reason is that people are coming from communities with a very stable culture of mutual support.

A demographer named Rick Mines did a survey of indigenous farm workers in California and found that a third of workers he interviewed reported earning wages that were less than minimum way. Clearly people are not happy about the situation and try to organize to change it.

So this massive movement of people as a result of NAFTA is also leading to a rebirth of union organizing among farm workers in California. But while this has had a very positive impact on working class life here, it has come at a terrible cost. The uprooting of communities of people forced people to make some terrible choices.

A friend of mine is a high school teacher in Oaxaca. He says that it is very difficult to stand up in front of his class and urge his students to get an education in Oaxaca when the students themselves have family members and friends working in the United States making more in real wages than he is making as a teacher.

This process of forced migration is robbing people of a future in the communities where they live. This has terrible consequences for these communities. There are towns in Oaxaca now where most of the working age population is living in the United States and the people who remain are surviving on the remittances being sent home by their family members here in California. That is not a very stable situation and doesn't promise much for the future.

That is what The Right to Stay Home is about. People in Oaxaca are saying that there is nothing wrong with migration but it should be a voluntary choice. The choice of whether to leave home and come to the United States should be voluntary, not something that is forced on people by hunger.

What has to change in order for that to happen? The trade agreements must be changed to eliminate the dumping that leads to forced migration. We need political change in both countries to give people the freedom to migrate, equality and decent jobs. But we also need to ensure that the towns that people are coming from are places that are able to offer a future to their young people as they are growing up.

Dennis Bernstein: Has the situation gotten appreciably worse under Trump?

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