>Surely this migration - which tends to break down cultural and thus
>national barriers - is a good thing, even if the reason behind it is
>bad?
It's neither good nor bad, neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary, in itself. Progress, for the Left, is what _we_ make; it is _not_ an automatic result of a growing Empire!
Migration often helps improve individual migrants' economic prospects (even if the result is sometimes just subsistence-level survival); otherwise, why would anyone bother to migrate? In terms of collective welfare, however, migration might be sometimes counter-productive.
1. Migrant workers' labor helps to resolve politico-economic problems in both countries that send them and those that receive them. Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada, for instance, has been advocating an "open border" idea of sorts, since enormous remittances -- currently to the tune of $6-8 billion -- are at stake:
***** The New York Times December 14, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 12; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: Mexico Chief Pushes New Border Policy: Free and Easy Does It BYLINE: By TIM WEINER DATELINE: CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, Dec. 13
Irma Anzures was driving back to Juarez this afternoon over the Free Bridge, after a little shopping in El Paso, when Mexican customs officials pulled her over for a routine inspection.
Then the president of Mexico stuck his head in the window.
"How's it going?" President Vicente Fox asked Ms. Anzures, 43, who runs three fast-food restaurants in Juarez with her husband. "How are the people treating you? Everything O.K.?"
A million Mexicans who live and work in the United States are coming home for Christmas, and Mr. Fox, as their new president, wants to welcome them back to a changed country.
The Free Bridge is not always free. On the United States side, in El Paso, officials take pains to stop suspicious people, routinely backing up traffic a mile or more. On the Mexican side, in Juarez, officials sometimes take money for nothing. "People have a lot of complaints, especially about bribes disguised as fines or fees," said Lizbeth Vela, a 21-year-old business administration student.
Mr. Fox dropped in at the Free Bridge on a two-day tour of border posts and stations, part of a campaign he began with his inauguration speech 12 days ago. He wants the millions of Mexicans crossing the border in both directions each year to travel freer and easier, possessing more visas from the United States to work legally, and facing fewer shakedowns from Mexican border officials when they come home. He also wants Mexican-Americans to enjoy full dual citizenship, including the right to vote from the United States by absentee ballots.
All this is part of his larger vision: that in 20 years' time, maybe less, maybe more, the border will no longer be a barrier, fortified by armed guards, but a mere line on a map dividing two partners in a common market, and with much more in common than what divides the United States and Mexico today.
It was that way once and it will be again, said Jose Posada Pompa, 80, a citizen of Juarez since 1933 and a loyal member of Mr. Fox's National Action Party since 1941.
"In those days, you walked to El Paso and back freely," said Mr. Posada, a retired mining businessman who turned out at the bridge for a glimpse of Mr. Fox. "I went to school in El Paso as a child. The two cities were like one family. You were free to go as you pleased. It was beautiful.
"It all changed when the cities grew in population, when the peso kept falling, and of course, we were ruled by a dictatorship for so many years, without the possibility of change, and we were able to develop nothing," he said.
For generations, Mexico regarded people who left for the United States as turncoats who would sell their patrimony for a fistful of dollars. That began to change more than a decade ago. The Mexican government, anticipating the advent of free-trade pacts with the United States and the closer ties that billions in new commerce would create, began quietly reaching out to Mexican-Americans through consulates, community organizations and public relations campaigns.
Mr. Fox, as is his style, has turned up the volume.
He sees the millions who have left for the United States as courageous and creative souls who "want to dream the American Dream."
"We want to salute these heroes, these kids leaving their homes, their communities, leaving with tears in their eyes, saying goodbye to their families, to set out on a difficult, sometimes painful search for a job, an opportunity they can't find at home, their community or their own country," he said on Tuesday during a stop at a border post just south of the Arizona border in Nogales.
The economic power of Mexicans in the United States is huge in Mexico.
Their remittances -- the money that the migrants send back home -- can be a huge boon to poor villages and towns in a nation where perhaps half of the nearly 100 million people are dirt poor.
Though estimates vary, the best guess is that the workers among the roughly eight million Mexicans living in the United States send between $6 billion and $8 billion back to their families every year, making them at least the third-biggest legitimate force in the Mexican economy, after oil and tourism. (Figures for the underground economy, led by drug trafficking, are notoriously unreliable, but certainly are measured in billions).
Mr. Fox wants his heroes to come home, eventually, but first he says he has to create the economic conditions that will draw them back. He has said over and over that illegal immigration from Mexico will not cease until the Mexican economy can provide more jobs and better pay, offsetting the demand for Mexican labor in the United States.
Roughly 1.5 million Mexicans are arrested annually trying to cross the border illegally. The migrants are dying at a rate of one a day in the process -- 369 deaths in the year ending Oct. 1. -- mostly from heat, thirst or exhaustion, but increasingly under fire from United States border officials or citizens defending their land from intruders. Mr. Fox has appointed a cabinet-level official, Ernesto Ruffo, to a newly created post overseeing the border and the plight of migrants.
The United States should see legal migrants in a different light, said Isela Arrendondo, 24, who works for the Chihuahua state convention bureau in Juarez. "I know the United States is worried about drugs, illegals, contraband and such things," she said. "But legal travel, with passports and visas -- there's a human right to travel freely, and not be regarded as a criminal."
Mr. Fox may have little power to change the way the United States regards Mexican migrants, legal and illegal. But on this tour -- a campaign, really, exhorting officials to clean up their acts, in much the same way that he sought votes during his three-year campaign for president -- he is trying to make the border a better place for a homecoming.
"We've got to build in this delicate terrain," he told a group of customs officials. "On one hand, to comply with the law, and on the other, to have the heart and the desire to embrace our fellow countrymen and brothers." *****
I wonder what Hardt & Negri think of Fox, who wants to shore up the ailing Mexican economy through migrant laborers' remittances. One might say that it's migration that helps prevent the contradictions of Mexican political economy from "ripening." (The same goes for other states on the periphery, as well as for rich nations who enjoy the surplus value production of super-exploited labor.)
2. And then there's the problem of "brain drains":
***** New York Times 21 January 2001
Fear and Famine
This first-person account of the horrors of Ethiopia interweaves politics, family history and traditional tales.
By ROB NIXON
...Africa is at risk of becoming, among other things, a continent of lost stories as nation after nation becomes enmeshed not only in warfare but in the fight against AIDS. Yet African literature does not command the attention in the West that it did 20 or 30 years ago, and there are fewer great writers to bear witness to the continent's huge stories of heroism and ruination. The major figures -- Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Bessie Head, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Buchi Emecheta -- have either died or slid toward semiretirement. Of the Anglophone authors, only the peripatetic Somali Nurrudin Farah still writes at the peak of his powers.
The reasons for this decline are both external and internal. With the passing of decolonization's high age, Western expectations of Africa -- and Western interest in its stories -- have waned. The continent's battered idealism has also bled sub-Saharan African literature of some of its former energy: it is impossible to imagine an African writer today producing a fiercely optimistic novel like Sembene's ''God's Bits of Wood'' or Ngugi's ''Grain of Wheat.'' Most decisive, however, has been the gutting of African universities and other cultural institutions necessary for sustaining literary careers on the publishing periphery. To a degree true on no other continent, to be an African author now almost requires that one live elsewhere, remote from the everydayness of the societies one strives to portray. Europe and North America currently boast more venerable African writers than Africa itself. And the continent's most exciting new literary talents have followed suit: Mezlekia lives in Canada, the Ugandan Moses Isegawa in the Netherlands, the Nigerian Biyi Bandele-Thomas in Britain.... *****
"To a degree true on no other continent, to be an African author now almost requires that one live elsewhere, remote from the everydayness of the societies one strives to portray." This is a result of "the gutting of African universities and other cultural institutions necessary for sustaining literary careers on the publishing periphery" due to the neoliberal hegemony of the self-aggrandizing Empire. Is it a really "progressive" trend if so many stellar African intellectuals must now live elsewhere than in Africa in order to make a living?
3. In war-torn states & regions, those who cross borders illegally can be _very well armed_, and they are _not_ necessarily on the same political side as you are. Think of multilateral invasions of Congo, to take just one example.
4. With no border policing whatsoever, be it literal or virtual, how do you control tax evasions, etc.? You mean to say that a government shouldn't tax?
Yoshie