Media coverage of the hundreds of thousands of Central Asian
and Mexican migrants who attempt to make their way into the USA each year have been near hysterical, sensations, fear-mongering, paranoid, racist, and perhaps most egregiously misleading. American media has most often framed the issue of migrants through a narrow, simplistic, and frankly dehumanizing frame that presents migrants and refugees as seeking “a better life,” jobs, or leaving their homes and
cities because of “gang violence” or “crime.” What is left unaddressed is that trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have ruined local economies in countries like Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.
These trade policies opened the door to highly subsidized US agribusiness conglomerates, immediately flooding the markets with their products. Millions were bankrupted, and local agriculture was destroyed, forcing millions off their lands and pushing them towards the city and its teeming
slums. Perhaps the most significant population exodus in Mexico’s history directly results from “agricultural liberalization” policies.
There is no easier way to understand that the migrant crisis is a
capitalist crisis. Even the opening statement of the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) piece; “One of the clearest stories from the NAFTA experience has been the devastation wreaked on the Mexican countryside by dramatic increases in imports of cheap US corn.” It may be the most straightforward story, but it seemed not to have caught the media’s attention.
The other clear story is that NAFTA is designed to exploit lower-cost labour in Mexico. And cheap labour-displaced, unemployed people without options don’t grow on trees but must be created. As John Berger long wrote:
Migrant workers come from underdeveloped economies. The
term “underdeveloped” has caused diplomatic embarrassment. The word “developing” has been substituted. “Developing” as distinct from “developed”…An economy is underdeveloped because of what is being done around it, within it and to it. There are agencies which under-develop.
Similar chaos has resulted because of CAFTA. The Northern
Triangle–Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador–have become so dangerous and violent that hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee, including children, towards the USA for safety. Throughout this exodus, the US has continued to provide support, military and political, to dictatorships, coups, and military juntas in the region. Joe Biden’s ironically named “Alliance for Prosperity” plan for aid and improving “security” in counties like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador called for these governments to work closely with the US and “international financial institutions and the private sector.” Lost to America’s new President-elect was that the US, international finance, and the private sector were precisely the three forces that were tearing apart the people’s lives in these countries and leaving them with severe insecurity and fear for their lives—and ultimately, heading towards the US border. There is a relationship between signing trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and US financial, military, and diplomatic support for authoritarian regimes in the region.
These regimes facilitate and benefit from capitalist extraction and profiteering. When the media differentiates between “economic migrants” and “war refugees,” denigrating the former as illegitimate while expressing sympathy for the latter, they operate with fictitious categories. They create the impression that economics, trade, and war are unrelated. Perhaps they might understand better if they paid attention to the two lawsuits filed by US mining companies under NAFTA that threatened Mexico with a bill of nearly $4 billion. These lawsuits are designed to break the back of environmental legislation and community organizations holding up mining projects. Global trade agreements, international financial arrangements, debt, and, equally, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are among the most powerful forces operating on a nation’s economic, political culture, and social welfare programs. As Gupta and Sharma argue,
Challenges to state sovereignty are being led by global
capitalism, but major changes (e.g., in fiscal, labor, or
environmental policies) are not confined to the sphere of business and its regulation. Sovereignty is being disentangled from the nation-state and mapped onto supranational regulatory institutions and nongovernmental organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and OXFAM. Such state-like institutions govern the conduct of national states and economies and manage the welfare of people living in different territories. Transnational governance is apparent in the large and rapidly growing number of global agreements regulating everything from trade and labor to the environment, endangered species, development, violence, and human rights. Responses to these emergent global forms of governance and inequality are also being organized as transnational networks.
The impact of such powerful transnational forces today is even
more significant and has fundamentally affected the political and economic sovereignty of the nations of the global south. Achille Mbembe, speaking about the power of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), argued;
The tutelage of international creditors was considerably
strengthened and now involves a range of direct interventions in domestic economic management, credit control, implementing privatizations, laying down consumption requirements, determining import policies, agricultural programs and cutting costs–or even direct control of the treasury.
The consequence for national political decision-making, regional conflict resolution, social and cultural life, and community has been significant. The state’s power to operate the nation-state has diminished, and it no longer has the financial means or even the administrative ability to resolve the political and economic crisis. There is today, Mbembe continues, a “direct link…between, on the one hand, deregulation and the primacy of the market and, on the other, the rise of violence and the creation of military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional organizations.”
Journalists often use the tactic to deflect or disappear these transnational forces–many of which are heirs to colonial-era privileges and power hegemonies–to write about countries as discrete, isolated units encapsulated within clear and explicit juridical and geographical boundaries. US journalists prefer to represent and understand nations as social anthropologist Ernest Gellner did, as “discrete, ethnological units unambiguously segmented on the ground, thereby naturalizing them along a spatial axis.” This habit reduces complex stories to shallow humanitarian and human rights narratives for convenient consumption. They omit the hard questions and reduce people to apathy, helplessness, victimhood, and damage.
It reduces complex lives, histories, memories, motivations, desires, and dreams into one of many forms of “contemporary pathologization,” including refugees, asylum seekers, war victims, and the poor.
And it limits their speech and their role in the narratives written about them. They are silenced as whole human beings and allowed voice only as dependents to Western generosity and concern.