U.S. Trade Policy Keeps Refugee Numbers High

Central American Free Trade Agreement: A Big Part Of The Border Crisis

No one is mentioning the elephant in the room when it comes to the border refugee crisis.  We only see the debate on how to deal with the children, not how to mitigate the need for them to flee their own countries.   U.S. trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, The Central American Free Trade Agreement, have created awful sweatshop conditions in these countries. As a consequence, the U.S. has seen towns, once robust with factories and livable wage-paying jobs, now abandoned and relocated to a Central American country.

In an endless cycle of exploitation,  Central Americans continue to work in poor paying jobs that don’t keep them out of abject poverty while the multinational textile corporations make obscene profits.  In turn, governments are virtually owned by large corporations who are free to operate in any manner of their choosing.  Workplace safety is seldom a concern.  The slaves of the nineteenth century plantations have merely been reclassified as the peasant class of Central America, and their governments will keep it that way as long as it’s profitable.

The rallying cry from the misinformed right wing is President Obama is the sole reason for the current crisis.  However, CAFTA passed in the second term of George W. Bush.  Highly contested in the summer of 2005, the policy was very unpopular.  New America Magazine’s William F. Jasper said,

CAFTA will cost America “hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in foreign aid, additional waves of illegal aliens, and further entanglement in sovereignty-destroying international regulatory regimes….CAFTA fails the standards of justice and “will harm, rather than help, farmers and workers in Central America who are struggling to overcome poverty.”

CAFTA gives corporate investors new abilities to move production facilities and finished goods/services across international borders while providing guarantees that governments won’t get in the way of business. Corporations like Gap, Nike, and Wal-Mart, and industry groups including the American Apparel & Footwear Association claim that Central America needs CAFTA to keep its lousy paying sweatshop jobs from moving to China.  This is unfettered capitalism at its absolute ugliest.

We are, in essence, too cheap to pay any import duty on these garments, creating insane profit margins for the corporations’ owners and shareholders. A worker making .25 per hour is still in dire poverty.  Add the elements of gang violence, natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and the political unrest that comes with U.S. interference in socialist movements and you’ve got conditions in Central America that mimic the devastation of Darfur.

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