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May 02, 2006
Policy makers forget recent history in new war on immigrants
ttp://www.timberjay.com/current.php?article=2285
Tuesday, May 02, 2001906 Volume 17, Issue 17
By Marshall Helmberger
Sometimes it seems that America¹s policymakers never learn. For more than 20 years, this country has engaged in a so-called war on drugs that has focused almost exclusively, and unsuccessfully, on the supply side, without addressing the reasons behind the growing demand for drugs in the U.S. Now, our policymakers want to apply this same failed model to the issue of illegal immigration.
Just think about this. Over the past two decades, the U.S. has poured hundreds of billions of dollars attempting to enforce drug laws that apply stiff criminal penalities to illicit traffickers. The primary effect of those efforts has been to swell the U.S. prison population, from about 350,000 in 1973 to more than 2.1 million today. Every year, our nation pours more than $7 billion into building new prisons and more than $35 billion into housing our massive prison population. Our drug laws are so Draconian that we now imprison almost 750 Americans for every 100,000 population. That¹s about 25 percent of the entire world¹s prison population, and it¹s despite the fact that the U.S. is home to just five percent of the world¹s population.
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And the end result of this unprecedented effort to crack down on illicit drugs? According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the use, the purity and availability of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and other illegal drugs is as high as its ever been.
The war on drugs, by any measure, has been a failure. Waging a similar war on immigrants will be no different. It will result in greater prison populations, greater human suffering, greater expense, and little if any decline in the flow of illegal immigrants.
Just as our drug war has failed because we refuse to address the demand side of the problem, our war on immigrants will meet a similar fate if we do not honestly address the reasons that so many illegals head north. While U.S. policymakers touted NAFTA as a way to help stem the tide of illegal immigrants from Mexico, its passage in 1993 had exactly the opposite effect. According the Pew Hispanic Center, the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, which had actually been declining in the early 1990s, surged 61 percent in the wake of NAFTA.
While there are a number of factors behind that surge, one of the most significant is the breakdown in the rural Mexican farm economy caused by cheap, susidized U.S. farm products, which suddenly flooded the Mexican market as a result of NAFTA. The trade pact forced an estimated 1.7 million Mexican farmers off the land as they could not possibly compete against the Cargills of the world.
The devastation to Mexico¹s rural economy was cited as a major concern by US Catholic Bishops last year in responding to legislation to extend similar trade provisions to Central America. The so-called CAFTA agreement was narrowly approved in Congress last year, to predictions that it would further add to the stream of poor Hispanics looking for an alternative to grinding poverty.
What these people seek is an opportunity to better their lives and the lives of their families. In many cases, its a matter of basic survival.
To think that we can isolate ourselves from the reality of Third World poverty on our doorstep through the building of walls and prisons is an illusion. Criminalization has failed in the war on drugs and it will fail in our new, unfortunate war on immigrants. As long as our trade policies work against the interests of average workers in Latin America, immigrants will continue to find their way here. The question is, do we find a way to make room for them and reap the rewards to our economy, or do we punish them for hoping for a better life in America?
Posted by lois at May 2, 2006 10:36 AM