Guest Column
The green line: Migration problem tied to conservation issues
- By Talli Nauman
- The Herald Miami/El Universal
September 11, 2006
On the airplane from Chicago to Mexico City, I asked the flight attendant for a “Mexico newspaper.” He brought me the Chicago Tribune. Okay. Come to think of it, the two top stories on the front page and one of the main bars on the business page were about Mexicans. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Miami Herald and any number of other leading dailies in the United States have a similar balance on a given day.
In this case, the big story was the bad news that Puebla native Augusta Téllez lost six of her eight children in a Chicago tenement fire that rescue workers suspect started from a candle providing the only light for school homework. The 43-year-old Chicago laundry worker had moved to the United States as an illegal migrant at least eight years back. The family had been without electricity since May. Her kids, ages 3 to 14, and another 3-year-old visitor were killed when the blaze filled their three-bedroom brick apartment with smoke and blasted their humble belongings out the upper story windows.
The newspaper’s adjacent special report on “Throwaway Workers” featured Raúl Rosas, an undocumented worker until he was paralyzed when a tree fell on him in a workplace accident. Since he is an illegal migrant, he is ineligible for workers’ compensation. Now barely able to sell fruits and vegetables from his wheelchair at a Chicago street corner stand, he can no longer contribute much to his family’s economy and is a burden for the limited public health facilities available.
Paradoxically, at the same time that these Mexicans sought employment in the United States, employers were moving from there to Mexico. That was the topic of the business page article in which The Associated Press interviewed Ciudad Juárez maquiladora workers who now hold the jobs U.S. residents once had in the small town of Greenville, Michigan. Andrés Lozano, one of more than 2,300 employees who are swelling the runaway Electrolux home appliance factory to twice its former size, makes the same amount of money for a day’s work as the Michigan employees made in one hour — US$10.
These predicaments are not only appropriate subjects to broach on the occasion of the Labor Day holiday celebrated at the outset of September each year in the United States. They highlight the heartbreak and pain that raise so many issues in the never ending migration policy debate.
With Mexico and the United States tied ever more closely, government and business on both sides of the international border must find ways to work together to iron out political economic relations for better public welfare. They have got to stop wringing the lifeblood out of the very communities that they depend on. Clearly, the ethos of so-called free trade, as embodied in the 12-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, is not addressing these issues effectively, despite ample pressure from organized civil society.
The same is true of environmental issues. An undetermined but probably not small proportion of Mexican migrants are uprooted due to natural resource dilemmas.
Water depletion and pollution, erosion, and poor conservation techniques drive people off the land they would otherwise farm. Also fueling their exodus is unfair competition due to weakened tariff protections in the globalized market and lack of policy for integrated strategies supporting smalltime growers.
One of the biggest environmental land-use incentives to migration is the still relatively new provision for privatization of the “ejido” or trust lands. These cooperatively governed units, covering about half of Mexico’s territory, could not legally be sold until the advent of free trade and World Bank structural adjustment directives convinced the Mexican government to smash the foundations of the previously near-sacred institution.
Proponents of ejido privatization have argued that proprietors’ inability to sell their ejido parcels enforced poverty when lands failed to produce the results intended in their post-revolutionary era dole-out for the purpose of redistributing the wealth. Poverty in turn fuels migration.
What this vantage point lacks, however, is an analysis of the poverty and migration resulting from the sale of the lands. In many cases, the money received for sales of subsistence plots is spent within a matter of months, leaving the former landholders not only broke, but alone with no place to live.
Many migrants who never had any land to begin with are nonetheless motivated to travel in search of work by environmental problems. Take fisheries exhausted because of inadequate enforcement of limits, for example. Take smog that makes asthma sufferers’ survival contingent on moving, for another. The examples are really too numerous to mention.
But one thing’s for sure: Lobbyists and policy makers who consider environmental challenges as part of the equation in resolving migration and employment woes will be contributing to their own prosperity and the good of all.
Talli Nauman is a founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, a project initiated with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. (talli@hughes.net)
The Herald Mexico edition/El Universal article at:
http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=34523&tabla=articulos
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