MesoAmerica Comes to North America: The Rise of the Migrant Workers' Movement

The migrant worker's movement is engaged in an independent political struggle, directed against local, state and particularly the national government. The movement's immediate objective is to defeat congressional legislation designed to criminalize employed migrant workers and a "compromise" designed to divide recently arrived workers from older workers. The key demand of the migrant workers is the legalization of all workers, new and old. The choice of direct action methods is a response to the ineffectiveness of the legalistic and lobbying activities of established middle-class controlled Latino organizations and the near-total failure of the labor confederation and its affiliates to organize migrant workers in trade unions or even build solidarity organizations.

To understand the dynamic growth of migrant labor movement in the US and its militancy, we need to analyze the structural changes of the 1980's and 1990's in Mexico and Central America.

NAFTA, Proxy Wars and Free Markets

Beginning in the 1980's, the US via the IMF, and its client presidents in Mexico (Salinas, Zedillo and Fox) promoted a "free trade" policy codified in the North American Free Trade Area. This policy opened the door to the inflow of heavily subsidized US agricultural commodities undermining local small and medium size farmers. Large-scale foreign investments in retail enterprises, banking and finance led to the bankruptcy of millions of small business people. The growth of free trade industrial zones (maquiladoras) led to the decline of protective social and labor legislation. Foreign debt payments, corrupt privatizations and large-scale growth of precarious employment led to an absolute decline of wage levels, even as the number of Mexican billionaires multiplied. Huge profits and interest payments accruing to US corporations and banks flowed back to the US, as did billions of dollars from corrupt politicians, money laundered by US banks like CITI Corporation.

Displaced and impoverished rural and urban workers soon followed the outward flows of profits and interest. The reasoning, according to the "free markets", was that free flows of US capital to Mexico should be accompanied by the free flow of labor, of Mexican workers to the US. But the US did not practice the "free market" doctrine: it pursued a policy of unrestricted entry of capital into Mexico and a restricted policy on labor migration.

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