Guest Column
The wall of humiliation
- The wall of humiliation
- By Fred Rosen
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal
- October 9, 2006
In this fractious and divisive political season, many Mexicans have been yearning for something that might unify them, at least for a while.
Well, this past Wednesday, Pres. George W. Bush authorized a $33.8 billion "border security" budget for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for the coming fiscal year. For Mexicans, the budget's most unifying expenditure line is the authorization of $1.2 billion for the extension of an anti-undocumented-immigrant wall along some 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border, principally between the states of Arizona and Sonora.
That line in the Homeland Security budget has united Mexicans across the political spectrum — at least on one issue. As Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez fielded hostile questions on that same Wednesday afternoon from opposition members of the Chamber of Deputies regarding U.S.-Mexico relations, he did so under a banner that read, "Mexicans united against the wall of humiliation."
The construction of the wall has now been approved by both houses of the U.S. Congress, and pending a House-Senate conference to reconcile some details in the two versions of the bill, it awaits Bush's signature. Having approved the budget, it is unlikely that Bush — despite his announced misgivings — will veto an election-year bill that much of his grassroots constituency heartily supports.
After the Senate passed its version of the bill last Friday, Secretary Derbez, told reporters he would send a "note of protest" to the White House, warning that the wall "is not the solution" to the migratory problem faced by the two countries.
For all that it matters, Bush may well agree. Instead of a wall, he has proposed a kind of guest-worker program that would give temporary work visas to migrant workers who had verifiable job offers in the United States. His proposal, supported by much of the U.S. business community that depends on low-wage labor, has gone nowhere.
For both the outgoing and incoming Mexican governments, an immigration accord is a high priority not only on their foreign relations agendas, but on the domestic labor front as well. Absent the kinds of major public works programs the governing National Action Party (PAN) routinely denounces as "populist," President-elect Calderón can become the "president of employment," as he has promised to be, only if a large number of jobs remain available to Mexican workers outside the country.
Fox and Calderón have another reason to be concerned about anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. The Bank of Mexico estimates that total remittances from Mexicans working abroad — the vast majority in the United States — will amount to over $25 billion dollars in 2006, up from $20 billion in 2005.
For many localities in Mexico, remittances amount to a source of income greater than any other, public or private. And in some cases, these private remittances are put to public use, improving local services and repairing local infrastructure. While many Mexican workers are slipping into informal employment and losing formal-sector health and pension benefits, remittances are strengthening local health clinics, both public and private.
And there are misgivings from the other side. While Mexicans are united against humiliation from the North, the U.S. is sharply divided about immigration from the South. New York City's Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, told Senate immigration hearings last summer that undocumented immigrants had become indispensable to his city's economy: "Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders or overstaying their visas, and our businesses broke the law by employing them, our city's economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation."
The mayor, an astute entrepreneur, knows how his city works. Political scientist Immanuel Ness, writing in Dollars and Sense magazine, estimates the number of the city's "low-wage immigrants" — those earning less than $10 an hour — to be about 500,000. Of those, over 70,000 are Mexicans. They work, reports Ness, as "bricklayers, demolition workers, and hazardous waste workers on construction and building rehab sites; as cooks, dishwashers, and busboys in restaurants; and as taxi drivers, domestic workers, and delivery people."
The migration from South to North is a global phenomenon, impelled by (and impelling) the growth of low-wage, service-sector employment in the North and the undermining of rural economies in the South. Many migrants find that in order to support their communities of origin, they have to leave home. The UN's Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reports that remittances sent to Latin America last year amounted to over $50 billion, and are predicted to top $60 billion in 2006.
Can a wall stop such a powerful trend? Can it be anything more than a cruel, deliberate humiliation?
- frosen@cablevision.net.mx
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal article at: http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=35210&tabla=articulos
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