Understanding America's Immigration "Crisis"1

MIDWAY through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the United States was widely perceived to be experiencing an immigration crisis. As of 2006, three-quarters of all Americans rated immigration as a moderately big or very big national problem; more than half (54%) said that the United States needed to be protected against foreign influence; and nearly half (48%) said that newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American values and customs. Given the hysteria surrounding immigration and border control, it is not surprising that Americans drastically overestimate the relative number of immigrants present in the country. Although the true percentage of immigrants in the U.S. stands at around 12%, some 53% of Americans polled thought that it was 25% or greater.2 Readers have no doubt noticed that in the title to this essay I place the word in quotation marks. I do so not to downplay the scale of the recent increase in immigration or to minimize the severity of its associated problems, but to signal that to the extent a crisis exists, its origins are different from those imagined by most Americans and that it is very much a situation of our own making. Of immigrants present in the United States today, about a third are from Mexico, and among those living here in undocumented status the figure is closer to 60%.3 After Mexico, the next most important source for undocumented migrants is El Salvador, but it accounts for just 7% of the total. Were migration from Mexico to be managed more effectively, the problem of undocumented migration would be dramatically reduced in scale and become much more tractable. In a very real way, the current immigration stems from a fundamental contradiction lying at the heart of American policy toward Mexico-our schizophrenic attempt to create an integrated North American market within which borders are rendered permeable with respect to movements of goods, capital, information, services, raw materials, and certain kinds of people but impermeable with respect to the movement of workers. In the vain attempt to integrate all markets within North America except that for labor we annually spend billions of taxpayer dollars on border enforcement that is worse than useless-it is counterproductive. Rather than discouraging the entry of undocumented workers, it lowers their rate of departure and thereby raises net immigration. The rising number of workers present in exploitable legal categories, in turn, undermines the wages and working conditions in the United States. Despite all the rhetoric about floods and invasions, the rate of undocumented in-migration from Mexico has not changed in three decades. What has changed is the rate of undocumented outmigration, and that is entirely an artifact of our own policies. MOVING TOWARD INTEGRATION The year 1986 was pivotal in the political economy of North America. In that year, under pressure from international lenders, a new political elite in Mexico succeeded in overcoming historical opposition within the ruling party and orchestrated the country's entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The new economic regime naturally met with great favor in Washington-indeed, U.S. officials had long pushed for it. Still, there was the troubling problem of how to institutionalize these economic reforms and make them permanent. To solve this problem, President Carlos Salinas turned to the United States, asking to join a free trade agreement that had recently been concluded between Canada and the United States. By tying his neoliberal economic reforms to a treaty with Mexico's powerful northern neighbor, he would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a future president to abrogate them. The administration of George H. W Bush warmly embraced Salinas's overture and began talks to create what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The treaty was ratified by the U. …

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