Migration, Trade and Brutality “Why don’t you just stay here and farm coffee?”

“Why don’t you just stay here and farm coffee?”

-David Schmidt

The Mixtec indigenous community of San Juan Coatzóspam, nestled in the lush, forested mountains of the southern State of Oaxaca, is like many other rural communities across Mexico in two regards. (1) It is a beautiful place, with abundant natural resources, an ancient local culture full of lore and legends, and a spectacular view of the unspoiled wilderness. (2) In the past 20 years, it has practically become a ghost town. 

Most people have left Coatzóspam to look for work somewhere else.

People don’t leave beautiful places like Coatzóspam for no reason. They leave because of the macro-economic policies that fuel our own consumer economy.

In the case of Coatzóspam, it all goes back to coffee. For years, the Mexican government provided a stable price for small coffee farmers like the campesinos of Coatzóspam. The government institution INMECAFE provided credits to smallholders and guaranteed a baseline price. Then the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed. INMECAFE was disbanded. Mexico’s economy became more dependent on the economies of the U.S. and Canada. And coffee farming became a gamble.

Ever since 1994, the price of coffee has shot up and down. Some years, the farmers of Coatzóspam would spend all year preparing for the coffee harvest, only to find that the price of coffee on the world market had dropped. The market price of coffee—a price discussed in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away, a price dependent on the fluctuations of the stock markets in London and New York—would drop so low that farmers would actually lose money by farming coffee. A product that used to allow them to provide for their families had become a financial black hole.

So the farmers left.

I wish I could say this story only happened in Coatzóspam. But this is the story of hundreds of coffee-producing rural towns across Mexico. Across Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, South America. As neoliberal economic policies were implemented during the Reagan-Thatcher years of the 1980’s and 1990’s, international coffee-buying corporations like Nestlé and Sarah Lee gained more and more control of the coffee trade, at the expense of small farmers. Rural communities became more and more dependent on the fluctuations of coffee prices on the world market. 

I wish I could say this story was limited to coffee.

It isn’t. After NAFTA was signed, millions of smallholding peasant farmers across Mexico were driven off their land, as a result of the lopsided policies of NAFTA. Corn farmers could no longer make a living, as Mexico’s market was flooded with cheap corn from the U.S. And the U.S. corn is cheap for a reason—it’s subsidized with millions of dollars from the U.S. government. While Mexico was required to remove its subsidies for its own small corn farmers as a condition of NAFTA, the U.S. has continued to subsidize its own massive agribusiness. (To the detriment of small corn farmers in the U.S. as well.)

So people have left the countryside. If they can’t make a living there anymore, they leave.

In the case of Coatzóspam, the first time I visited the Mixtec native community in 2006, I saw a visible generation gap. I barely met anybody between the ages of 12 and 65—most of the people of working age had left to look for a source of income somewhere else. I was reminded of a friend who had visited the Soviet Union in the 1970’s and told me he had seen an entire generation of men missing—the men who were killed during Hitler’s invasion in WWII.

In the case of Coatzóspam, it’s not just the men who are missing—working age women and adolescent girls leave as well, looking for employment in the outside world. Mexico City. Sinaloa. Sonora. Baja California.

And many have crossed into the United States. Many Coatzóspam natives are working in the fields of the large factory farms in Salinas, Oxnard, Watsonville, Fresno. Rather than working on the plots of land their families have owned for generations, they are working to support the massive agricultural industry that drove their families out of business in the first place.

The young people come back to town every now and then. Sometimes they come back to visit during Saint John’s Day festivals in the summer, or during the Day of the Dead at the end of October. Sometimes they come back after being deported from the United States.

And many of them come back changed. Resentful. Angry. A slow-boiling rage churns in the bellies of many young men who come back to town.

We’ll look more closely at this anger in the next installment.

This article is part of a series, “Migration, Trade and Brutality: A Journey through Mexico and Central America”, written byDavid Schmidt regarding his travels in Summer 2012. David is a volunteer with World Relief Garden Grove serving all of Southern California.

David Schmidt is a freelance writer and multi-lingual translator in San Diego, CA. He is a proponent of immigrants' rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income. He can be contacted at davidschmidt2003@hotmail.com .

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

What’s So Unfair about How We Do Trade?

A discussion on Trade and Migration: Some Myths

By David Schmidt

Not long ago, I was talking with a friend about the living conditions of migrant farm workers in Maneadero, Mexico. I had just made a trip to the Baja California town, and described people living in tin shacks, packed ten to a room. Some folks sleep on the ground, in the dirt, under shanties made from plastic tarps. Children walk around naked, bellies distended from parasites, hair bleached blond by malnutrition. Mothers cradle babies who were born with birth defects and deformities, because of the chemicals that were sprayed on the field while the pregnant women were working. 

As I described this scene to my friend, she looked at me with suspicious indifference. “That’s too bad, David,” she said. “But we can’t spend all our time worrying about the plight of people who have it rough in life. I mean, if we sit around thinking about all the people suffering in the world, we’ll go crazy. And what can I do about it, anyway? And why should I do anything about it? I mean, what do these poor migrant farm workers in Mexico have to do with me?”

What, indeed?

* * * *

This will be the first in a series of discussions about two intricately related issues: 

(1) The people who immigrate to this country, and 

(2) The ways our companies, our economy, our government’s trade policies, and our consumer lifestyle force people to migrate.

You don’t hear many people talk about the causes of immigration. When the topic of immigration comes up in the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, or other countries with high populations of recent migrants, the debate is typically centered on how immigrants affect the country that receives them. Progressive voices defend the immigrants’ rights, arguing for the benefits they bring to the receiving country; reactionary voices claim that immigration is a threat to their nation. 

But you don’t hear a lot of talk about the reasons why people migrate to begin with. Immigrants are treated as if they had materialized out of nowhere. Indeed, the dehumanizing term “alien” may be strangely appropriate for the way many native-born citizens view people who come from other countries—immigrants are discussed as if the dropped out of the sky. All that’s missing is the flying saucer. 

Pro-immigrant folks argue that immigrants are good for the United States; anti-immigrant folks say immigration harms our country. Both sides, however, subscribe to what I call the Myth of the American Biosphere. Our country is treated as if it were some sort of independent, closed off habitat which immigrants have “entered”. 

But when a person crosses the borders of the United States, is this the first contact they have ever had with this country? Is this their first interaction with the economic and political systems in which we live, breathe and work?

Pundits in the U.S. rarely touch on the causes of immigration—and when they do, it’s usually folks on the anti-immigrant side of the aisle. Most of them get it pitifully wrong—I typically hear people claim that there is something endemically wrong about the countries that people migrate from. That their countries are “corrupt”, or “dysfunctional”, or “backwards”. These sorts of ethnocentric accusations imply that the causes of immigration have nothing to do with us. That our country is “suffering” from the effects of immigration, and that immigration happens because “those countries just can’t get their act together”. Let’s call this Myth #2: The ‘Their Country Sucks’ Myth.

As long as we hold to these two above-mentioned myths, we can allow ourselves to believe in a third myth: what I call simply Myth #3: The Myth of Amnesty. If we view the U.S. economy as a closed system, disconnected from the rest of the world, and believe that people come into the U.S. because they “do not want to fix their own countries”, then we will probably assume that they have committed a crime by coming here. And if we treat immigration as a crime, then we will choose to be in favor of or against some sort of “amnesty”. 

As the dictionary definition of the term implies, “amnesty” is forgiveness for a crime that has been committed.  And as long as the discussion centers around the idea of “amnesty”, both approaches—the pro-amnesty or anti-amnesty crowds—imply that a crime has been committed. That a “wrong” has been done. 

The anti-amnesty crowd supports statements like the one I saw on a t-shirt at a gun show: “HELLO, 911—I’D LIKE TO REPORT 6 MILLION BREAK INS!”

Pro-amnesty folks will say, “It was wrong to come here without papers, you shouldn’t have done it, but we forgive you.” Even in current debates surrounding Obama’s partial implementation of the DREAM Act, many progressive arguments center around the idea that “young people shouldn’t have to pay for the wrong [sic] that their parents committed by coming here illegally”. 

However, in order to view immigration as a crime, we must also hold to the Myth of the American Biosphere and the ‘Their Country Sucks’ Myth (along with a whole slew of other myths which we haven’t time to go into here: the Myth of European Exceptionism, the ‘My Ancestors Can Come Here But You Can’t’ Myth, the ‘These Immigrants Are Different from Past Immigrants’ Myth, etc.)

It is my assertion that these myths are fundamentally false. 

The inequalities, poverty and misery that fuel immigration are intricately tied to our economy. To the products we consume. To our country’s trade policy. The inequality that has increased worldwide, the increase of poverty worldwide, is intricately connected with the prosperity enjoyed by the residents of countries that receive immigrants. As Chilean author Eduardo Galeano once said:

“Nuestra derrota estuvo siempre implícita en la victoria ajena; nuestra riqueza ha generado siempre nuestra pobreza para alimentar la prosperidad de otros...”

[TRANSLATION: “Our defeat has always been implicit in the victories of others; our wealth has always been used to produce our own poverty and feed into the prosperity of others…” From Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina. Translation mine.]

Poverty and prosperity. First World and Third World. Immigrant sending countries and immigrant receiving countries. They are two sides to the same coin. 

And it is this dual, two-sided world—a world of haves and have-nots, immigrants and native-borns—which we will explore in this series.

* * * *

So what about the farm workers of Maneadero? What about the poverty, misery, illness, birth defects, malnutrition…is this all just some lamentable (but uncontrollable) situation that has nothing to do with us?

No.

See, most of the vegetables grown in Maneadero are grown to be consumed, not in Mexico, but in the United States. In spite of the fact that Maneadero is located in northern Mexico, the agricultural fields are a part of the U.S. economy. The products are harvested and immediately shipped northward, across the border, to distributers in Los Angeles and Oakland.

These people are harvesting the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, jalapeños and strawberries that we consume. The enormous factory farms they work on employ them for their cheap labor. Which makes it easier to grow lots of vegetables and ship them north, across the border, into California. The vast majority of these vegetables picked by their hands come into our supermarkets. Our fast food restaurants. It’s the lettuce on our Taco Bell taco, the tomato on our Burger King whopper. 

Why don’t these supermarkets and restaurants just source locally, using vegetables grown in community gardens and bought at farmer’s markets?

Because it’s cheaper to exploit people in Maneadero and spray chemicals on them. As we’ll see in upcoming installments, this situation is the norm rather than the exception…and it applies to many of the products that we consume. 

There is a hidden cost behind cheap products. 

David Schmidt is a freelance writer and multi-lingual translator in San Diego, CA. He is a volunteer at World Relief Garden Grove, proponent of immigrants' rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income. He can be contacted at davidschmidt2003@hotmail.com

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

AM I A SAINT?

by David J. Schmidt

Before I came down to southern Mexico to volunteer with Fair Trade coffee coops in Chiapas and Oaxaca, I was chatting online with a friend from Russia who praised “all the altruistic work” (her words) that I’m involved in. As her comments became more gushing, I tried to deflect her adulation a bit. “Well…um…you know, Ksyusha,” I said, “not everybody is as well-off as we are. And if we see that we can do something to change things, we should try to help out.”

I kicked myself immediately after making that comment. I realized (a second too late) that it only served to reinforce my own faux-sainthood. And Ksyusha responded in kind: “Well you must be a very giving person, David. Because if I spent all my time thinking about all the people who are suffering in the world, I’d go crazy. I mean, there’s always someone out there who is hungry or sick or suffering, I can’t spend the whole day thinking about them…”

The conversation petered off at that point: Ksyusha went off to work in Russia, and I went to bed in California. I kept thinking about our conversation after I had turned off the lights, though.  Is Ksyusha right? Am I some sort of modern-day saint who has a supernatural capacity to feel compassion for others? The conclusion I reached was: no, I am not a holy person. (I think anyone who has spent an evening with me would agree.)

The work I do is not about sainthood, or even altruism for that matter.

It’s about justice. Setting things right.

Of course, all Christians are called to have compassion on those who suffer, to stand in solidarity with them, to welcome all of the suffering and downtrodden into the loving arms of the human family. But Ksyusha had a point…it is physically, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally and humanly impossible to always keep human suffering at the forefront of our minds.

If you think about it, at any given moment, there is someone out there who is having a hard time. And if you really think about it in a statistical way, during any waking second of our existence someone on this planet is experiencing something truly horrific and unspeakable. If we were to always keep ourselves mindful of all the pestilence, disease, senseless death, car accidents, cancer, rape, inexplicable illnesses, infant mortality and physical pain that exist on this planet, we truly would go crazy.

A good part of the reason we would go crazy is that the vast majority of this suffering is far away, disconnected from us. I call it the evening news mentality. In his excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death, author Neil Postman writes about how television changed the way we think about “news”, bringing us sound bites and news stories about events taking place in communities disconnected from our own. Someone killed her infant child in Cincinnati. A drunk driver hit someone in Las Vegas. A teenage girl went missing in Orlando.

These are all horrible things that happen…but they have nothing to do with me. I don’t live in Orlando, or Cincinnati, or Las Vegas. I don’t know any of the families affected by these things to be able to offer them comfort. These events aren’t happening to anybody who might be the cousin or friend or grandparent of my neighbors. I once heard an anecdotal story of an elderly church lady who would regularly ask the members of her congregation to pray for the characters on the favorite soap opera. I wonder sometimes, is this so different from our obsession with the “tragic news case of the week”? I have no connection to these people and communities…so what is the point in my losing sleep over them?

But when it comes to issues like the labor rights of women who work in assembly line sweatshops of Tijuana, the coffee farmers of Nicaragua, the children harvesting cocoa in West Africa, or the plight of immigrants living in our country without papers, we are talking about an entirely different sort of beast. These are all plights directly related to our lives.

The children who work as virtual, and often literal, slaves in Ghana are doing so, not because of the cruelty of some distant despot who has nothing to do with us. They are doing this so that we can have cheaper chocolate. Our companies and our economy keep them in that place.

The coffee farmer trying to feed his wife and children and find enough money to send his kids to school and pay the bills is not a case of “random bad luck” in some distant corner of the globe. That coffee farmer who tries to survive when the world market price of coffee is a roller coaster that goes up and down unpredictably, the coffee farmer who never knows how much he will be paid for his harvest—his precarious situation was created by those who control the world coffee market. So that you and I could have predictable access to cheap coffee.

The woman whose working-class suburb of Tijuana was polluted with chemicals that the U.S.-based factories dumped into her neighborhood, whose child was born with birth defects just like most of her neighbors’ children…

…her neighbor who works 12 hour days on the assembly line just to pay rent…

…her other neighbor who lost part of his arm in the factory and was never paid indemnity…

…their lives are no regrettable accident. Those factories set up shop in their neighborhood because it was cheaper to do so. Because they are part of this big, glorious, global economy that brings us the cheap consumer goods that we find in Target, Wal-Mart and K-Mart.

And when people flee these conditions—the world that was created by the soulless corporations and companies that bring us those consumer goods, a union-free, rights-free world that is kept that way by our military when countries challenge it—when people flee and come here in search of a better life, they get treated like criminals.

When people come to the United States following the natural flow of money and profits that are being bled from their homelands into the coffers of Phillip Morris, Nestle and Coca-Cola, when they follow that vast river of wealth flowing out of the South and into the North…they get treated like criminals, because they don’t have immigration papers. Papers which are practically impossible for poor people in their position to ever obtain in the first place.

These people are not strangers. They are not accidents. They are not distant, unfortunate circumstances. They are intimately, directly connected to our prosperity, our lifestyles, our wellbeing. Our opulence is their despair.

To be sure, there is plenty of suffering on this earth that is random, unpredictable, uncontrollable and senseless. And yes, the Church is called to heal that suffering and bring comfort to our sisters and brothers who are afflicted by it.

But let us not mistake immigrants’ rights, fair trade and social justice for such charity. These movements are about righting the wrongs committed by those who went before us. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of jumping into bed with Pharaoh, Caesar, Baal and Babylon. We engage in complicity with the empires of our broken world. Challenging the exploitative systems that dehumanize our fellow humans is not saintly compassion or altruism…

…it’s the least we could do.

David Schmidt is a freelance writer and multi-lingual translator in San Diego, CA. He is a proponent of immigrants' rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income.”

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

OPEN LETTER TO STATE SENATOR STEVE SMITH (R-AZ)

Dear State Senator Steve Smith,

I realize you have a lot on your plate, and I’m sorry to bother you with this little matter. But you see, it appears that you have access to some exclusive information that could really help out some of my friends, so I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing some of this insider’s info with us.

I heard your interview on NPR a couple months ago, and you sure seem to know a lot about how privileged immigrants are in the United States. More so, in fact, than many immigrants themselves. See, I have quite a few friends who are immigrants from Mexico and other countries, and apparently they have never been told about the great amenities and services available to them!

First things first—could you please direct my attention to the  open door in the U.S.-Mexico border through which people are able to walk through with ease and convenience, with or without papers? You see, a lot of folks I know were unlucky enough to make the cut for the Green Card lottery, and not patient enough to wait the average 182 years that it takes for a working class person to get any kind of permit. They couldn’t survive in their hometowns, thanks to all the U.S. companies that bled them of their wealth, and thanks to treaties like NAFTA that stack the cards against Mexico’s poor.

So they came here without papers.

Thing is, everyone I know was foolish enough to risk their lives crossing through the desert! Can you imagine that? Now apparently there is an open door somewhere in the border, but for whatever reason, none of my friends have heard of it. Could you help a brother out and let me know where this door is located? It would really help people avoid a life-endangering trek.

In addition, you refer to large groups of immigrants who “don’t want to change” and are forcing Americans to change and accommodate them instead. Now, my buddy José works 12 hours a day, busting his ass to earn a little money for his family, and on top of that he’s been taking night classes to learn English. This is because he lives in a part of the U.S. where most people speak English, and he doesn’t have access to a lot of services because of his limited ability with the language. In fact, he was having trouble ordering at McDonald’s the other day, and somebody behind him shouted, “It’s America, learn English or go home”.

Evidently, José is not aware that everybody in this country has secretly gone to the trouble of learning Spanish! Why have you all been holding out on him for so long? No seas sangrón, compa.

You also refer to enormous groups of people who “don’t want to change”. Could you tell my friend Wang Liu that? He’s been studying hard to take the driver’s test and learn the rules of the road here in the States. But apparently he doesn’t have to, according to you! Could you please direct him to the neighborhood where people are allowed to drive according to China’s laws without getting pulled over? I think it would really save him some time.

In fact, I’d love to put my friends in touch with these groups of anti-American immigrants who are taking from this country without giving anything back. See, my friends have foolishly been paying more in taxes than any services they can hope to benefit from! They pay sales tax, gas tax, property tax, rental tax, and the folks who use a false Social Security number have been paying thousands into our Social Security system without ever using any of this money! In addition, they’ve been wasting their time stimulating the U.S. economy by pumping cheap labor into our companies—the very companies that made a mess out of the job market in their own countries of origin! Man, are they going to be disappointed when they find out that they could have avoided pouring all this money into U.S. corporate and government coffers.

At the very least, you could be a champ and point them in the direction of the immigrant-friendly gangs that you referred to. The only gangs my friends have encountered are U.S.-based gangs made up of mostly U.S. citizens who rob them every now and then. In addition, some of these immigrants have had the bad luck of running into white supremacist gangs who beat them up (or worse) because of the way they look. Could you please shoot off an email to the 800-plus white supremacist organizations in the U.S. and let them know that “gang warfare” is for people from other countries? They seem not to have gotten the memo.

Last but not least, I can’t help but notice that you claim to be a devout Christian. Now this poses a problem for many of my friends who have come here from Latin America, because most of them consider themselves devout Christians as well, of both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant varieties. Evidently, however, there is no room in your Church for these people who do not share your cultural background. Could you please recommend a different religion for them to join? Do you know if Neo-Paganism or Zoroastrianism are still accepting new applicants?

Of course, I hate to ask my friends to change religions, since many of them are very attached to their faith in Jesus Christ. But evidently, this is the faith of xenophobia, bigotry and a U.S.-centric world view. So I’m afraid these folks will just have no choice. (You know what, on second thought, never mind the last part. Assuming that this vast apparatus exists that gives preferential treatment to undocumented immigrants, I’m sure there must be a program out there that helps folks get out of your church and into something more comfortable.)

Thanks for all your help!

Sincerely,

Confused in California

Guest Post: How Do Our Trade Policies Force People to Migrate?

By David Schmidt - Creating Alternative and Fair Enterprise (C.A.F.E.)

 Comedian Dave Chappelle featured a skit once in which he played the President of the United States. In response to the problem of millions of Americans without health insurance, Chapelle’s character offered a simple solution: since Canada offers universal health care to its citizens, he proposed Canadian identification cards for all US citizens. Americans could receive their medical treatment in Canada, free of charge!

Many people view immigration to the United States in similar terms. “Why do they have to come and use our resources, take our jobs, deplete our public services? Why don’t they just fix their own country?” Immigration reform is often couched in similar terms: legalizing undocumented immigrants is described as “amnesty”, which is, by definition, forgiving a crime that has been committed. Immigrants’ rights are often described as charity for people who have “stolen” something or “entered illegally”.