Living in San Antonio, only a couple of hours from the U.S/Mexican border, one is constantly reminded for the ongoing immigration and free trade debate that has enveloped the United States in recent years. Occasionally one sees a propagandistic billboard that tells San Antonians that free trade is good for the economy and that technocratic whiz kids from the U.S. and Mexico are working on “solutions” in commerce and whatnot, and another telling us that the Tans-Texas Corridor will be grand. For a minority of San Antonio’s population, the good times have indeed rolled for quite sometime, but if you look at San Antonio a little closer the shinny exterior gives away to a dismal reality: 17.3% of the San Antonio metropolitan area is in poverty, with many more tilting on the brink of the abyss.(County Info Project) Turning south toward the Rio Grand Valley, poverty skyrockets and remains heavily concentrated along the entire Texas-Mexico border. Starr county ranks among the country’s counties with the highest poverty rates at 47.4%. I many times just through talking to people you find out how “free trade” has helped them along. One class mate that I had in a literature class had to leave the El Paso area after the factory that they worked at had closed and went across the border. She was not angry that workers from Mexico had taken her work, she’s one of a majority of people that realize that the problem is found in the bankrupt ranks of policy hacks that formulate the country’s failed economic and political agendas. Economic liberalization has been the main root of the economic abyss that people in the United States, Mexico, and many other nations are slipping into.
Along the U.S.-Mexican no-mans land that is the border, communities have lived along the Rio Grande for generations given to the fact that the border was rather fluid for many decades until the neo-liberal era arrived. Failed neo-liberal economic reforms highlighted by the epic failure of NAFTA have shattered Latin American economies and left millions jobless creating the huge flood of “illegal immigrants” that should be known more properly as economic refugees, and the effects felt by domestic workers should not be minimized either. As with other immigrations of the 19th and 20th centuries, the flow of new immigrants, undocumented or not, has given rise to xenophobic “nativist” movements that revile all that they perceive as “un-American” forgetting that their ancestors had once came looking for refuge for whatever reason, including the original Spanish and English colonizers that stole the land from the only people that can truly lay claim to being natives in the American continents.
Politicians that have harnessed the political power flowing from the anti-immigration hysteria have proclaimed that there is a solution to curbing the flow of thousands of immigrants that try to enter the country every day: a separating xwall not unlike the one used in Palestine used to separate Israel from the occupied Palestinian population. Communities on both sides of the Rio have protested that the wall will adversely affect them culturally, economically, politically, and ecologically. Groups such as No Texas Border Wall and other activist groups are mounting resistance against this horrible crime against the people on both sides of the border. Check them out at http://notexasborderwall.org. The Socialist Party chapter in the Rio Grande Valley are also active in outreach and education about the border wall. One thing is certain, without addressing the causes of the mass, economically caused migration of people from the global south, whether it be Africans to Europe, South Americans to North America, things will only continue to worsen, the same goes for the “War On Terror.” The causes of a problem must always be examined, although I don’t that’s the policy elites problem, in their case its a matter of putting profits before people and the people always pay the consequences taking undeserved blame.
ZNetwork ತನ್ನ ಓದುಗರ ಔದಾರ್ಯದ ಮೂಲಕ ಮಾತ್ರ ಹಣವನ್ನು ಒದಗಿಸುತ್ತದೆ.
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