NEWS
Immigration issue is complex and requires bilateral solutions
- By Carlos Guerra
- San Antonio Express-News
- May 9, 2006
- "At some point," he says, "we are going to have to look at a developmental program for Mexico."
- To contact Carlos Guerra, call (210) 250-3545 or e-mail
cguerra@express-news.net.
When David Montejano discusses United States-Mexico issues, the historian's analyses are often punctuated with chuckles.
The San Antonio native and prize-winning author of "Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas" teaches at UC-Berkeley and is chairman of its Center for Latino Policy Research.
Recent immigrant-rights marches "are giving immigrants voices," he says, and 500,000 people marching through Dallas must have been particularly disturbing to anti-immigrant leaders.
He also dismisses some of the changes anti-immigration groups want as simplistic and ill-informed.
"We already have (employer sanctions) laws but we don't enforce them, except for the showcase raids last week on a pallet maker," he says, while major U.S. corporations were given a bye.
Montejano also dismisses guest-worker proposals as unrealistic.
"A guest-worker program that is anything like the bracero program — even with better protections — is not a solution to the structural problem," he says. "It will actually create even greater immigration."
And while most have forgotten about them, fervent anti-Mexican sentiments are hardly the first registered in the United States.
"In the 1920s there was a whole 'Mexican problem' that newspaper editorials and politicians — including those from Texas — were ranting and raving about," he says.
"And did that generation lead to the undoing of America?" the professors asks. "No, that generation's sons fought World War II, and their daughters served in the factories."
And their grandchildren were the first who attended universities in significant numbers.
"You also had Operation Wetback in the 1950s, and there were protests, but they didn't get the attention these latest protests have commanded," he continues. "The major difference (between the two waves of protests) is that now you have leading elected officials who can present the case, and that represents an advance."
Montejano also points out that U.S. immigration policy has long been of two minds.
"They want Mexican labor, but they don't want them to stay around," he says before laughingly dismissing the notion of sealing the borders and deporting all the undocumented immigrants.
"They're not serious about deporting 11 million people, it's about creating cheap labor; they just want to create an underclass," he says. "Making them all felons would really lower wages by practically creating prison labor."
But he is also clear that the current wave of protests still hasn't addressed an element key to the entire immigration conundrum.
"At some point, the protests ought to focus on Mexico, too, because two governments are involved in this situation, not just one," he reasons. "Nobody wants to talk about how NAFTA has contributed to this national dislocation of mexicanos, but that is what it is: A dislocation by a policy that was signed by the elites of both countries to benefit the elites of both countries."
Mexico's mass out-migration, and soon, Central America's, is from their collapsed agricultural sectors, and it will continue because those countries cannot compete with the United States' agricultural sector, price-wise. This noncompetitiveness has already turned Mexico, where corn was first developed, into a net importer of corn, an important staple.
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