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2. Why Do People Immigrate?

PEOPLE HAVE MANY REASONS FOR migrating, but major waves of migration are generally triggered by “push factors” such as economic or political problems in migrants’ home countries, and “pull factors” such as better opportunities in their new country. When we analyze the push factors, we often find that the countries where migrants arrive—the United States, for example—played a major role in creating the problems that caused people to leave their countries in the first place.

Our current immigration and trade policies do nothing to stem these push factors, and often make the situation worse. Why not focus on solving the problems that displace people from their homes, instead of making it harder for people to get here, and punishing them when they arrive?

What are the “root causes” of migration?

Some people are nomadic and don’t settle down in one place for any length of time. But most people prefer to remain in a relatively stable community in a particular area. Sometimes people are uprooted from their homes by violence, or by economic, social, or political pressures. This “forced displacement” can push people from rural areas into cities or refugee camps, from one region to another, or across borders into other countries.

The series of events in Ireland known as the “Great Famine” triggered the migration of some 1.7 million Irish people to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. People fleeing China to escape the violence and economic turbulence that accompanied the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) were a large part of the wave of immigration that brought more than 105,000 Asians here by 1880. Many of the two million Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States from 1881 to 1914 came because of sporadic anti-Semitic pogroms as well as discriminatory policies in Tsarist Russia that limited opportunities for a decent life.¹

Millions of people continue to migrate because their communities are devastated by poverty and violence. For others, it may be possible to survive in their communities, but by migrating they can get jobs that pay more, allowing them to seek a better future for their families. Many migrants hope to return home as soon as economic and political conditions in their homeland improve. Often these hopes are dashed, as conditions only worsen, and family members left behind increasingly depend on their support for basic needs.

Any of us might make the decision to migrate if we faced similar conditions. “I’m a retired cop,” said a Long Island man during a public meeting shown in the 2003 award-winning documentary Farmingville. “I was in the Marine Corps. I have a lot of respect for the laws of the United States. If I lived in Mexico and I knew I had some advantage here to help my family back in Mexico, I’d be wading across the Rio Grande myself. I’d be on a raft floating from Haiti, I’d be crossing the border from Yugoslavia into Germany. I’d be going into England. I’d do anything I can to help my family.”²

Why do people come to the United States?

Many people consider the United States to be a land of freedom and opportunity, and believe that people from around the world are eager to come here. For most people who are driven to migrate, a combination of three main factors influences where they choose to go: economic opportunities in the destination country; the presence of family or friends there who can help them get a job and a place to live; and the distance, difficulty, and expense of the trip.

The United States has a large economy with a range of job opportunities, and material goods tend to be cheaper here relative to income levels than in other countries. Our history as an immigrant nation means many foreign citizens have family or friends—or even entire communities from their homeland—already living here, and can help the newcomers adjust.

Some immigrants are drawn to the United States because it promises certain freedoms, like freedom of speech and religion. And despite persistent economic and social inequalities and racial discrimination in the United States, immigrants sometimes feel they can leave behind the class and caste prejudices of their home countries and make a fresh start here.

The United States is not the only country with high rates of immigration. As of 2013 more than 230 million people were living outside the country where they were born, about 3.2 percent of the world’s population. The approximately 44 million immigrants in the United States accounted for about one-fifth of these people.³

Immigrants generally settle in economically stronger, more stable countries that are comparatively easy to reach. Migrants from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia tend to settle in the United States; migrants from Africa and West Asia often prefer to go to Europe. Sometimes these patterns reflect historical relationships of colonialism that leave behind cultural, political, or linguistic links: for example, when North Africans go to France, or people from the Indian subcontinent move to Britain.⁴

Is it our fault other countries have so many problems?

In recent decades, immigrants to the United States have come largely from places where the U.S. government carried out major military, political, or economic interventions in the past. Of the top ten countries of origin for the million people who became permanent legal residents in 2012, seven experienced major U.S. interventions: Mexico, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, and South Korea.⁵

Claiming a need to stop influence by the Soviet Union, in the 1980s the U.S. government funded and promoted wars against leftist revolutionary movements in Central America. Some 300,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed: 200,000 in Guatemala, 70,000 in El Salvador, and 30,000 in Nicaragua. This represented about one death for every hundred inhabitants in the region.⁶ The United States has spent billions on a similar armed strategy in Colombia, where some 220,000 people have been killed and millions displaced over the last half-century as government forces tried to crush leftist insurgencies.⁷ The U.S. government has also trained Latin American military officers who have been accused of abducting, torturing, and murdering civilians throughout the hemisphere.⁸

The United States likewise bears a large share of responsibility for most of the economic crises that have sparked mass migration since the 1980s. These crises have their roots in economic policies dictated either directly by the U.S. government through its regional trade agreements, or indirectly through its influence over international lending institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).⁹

How do U.S. economic policies affect migration?

The IMF and the World Bank function by making loans to countries that are already heavily indebted, on the condition that their governments follow an economic model promoted by U.S. economists and the media as “open markets,” “free trade,” and “globalization.” Analysts in Latin America and much of the rest of the world call this model “neoliberalism.” (This comes from the old sense of “liberalism,” which referred to the free trade policies of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.)¹⁰

The neoliberal model and its “structural adjustments” involve reducing the supply of money; selling off state-owned industries and services to private companies; scaling back and privatizing healthcare, education, and other social programs; and eliminating or sharply reducing tariffs that protect domestic industries and agriculture. Such measures generally reduce inflation and stabilize currency exchange rates, but at a cost. Privatization throws tens of thousands of public employees out of work and reduces government revenues. Service cutbacks leave people without a social safety net when they fall on hard times. “Free trade” forces local farmers and manufacturers to compete with huge multinational corporations that are often subsidized by the governments of the wealthy countries where the multinationals are based.

The most dramatic result of such policies was a series of economic crises that followed their implementation: in Mexico in 1994 and 1995, in several Southeast Asian countries in 1997 and 1998, in Russia in 1998, in Brazil in 1999, and in Argentina in 2001.¹¹ But even in areas without major crises, these neoliberal policies cause exactly the sort of economic hardships that lead people to migrate.

Why do so many Mexicans come here?

After its 1910 revolution, Mexico grew from a primarily agricultural country to what in 2013 was the fifteenth-largest economy in the world, right behind Spain and South Korea. Until the 1980s its economic growth rate was frequently as high as 6 percent a year. Poorer Mexicans often didn’t share equally in the benefits of this growth, but life did improve for many people: the illiteracy rate was cut in half and mortality rates fell dramatically.¹²

In the early 1980s, Mexico suffered a financial crisis brought on by a worldwide recession and the government’s overborrowing during the 1970s oil boom. To get out of the crisis, the government started implementing a neoliberal economic model. Proponents of the change claimed that unemployment and other dislocations caused by these policies would be more than made up for by foreign investment, expanded trade, and a rapid expansion of industrial jobs in the maquiladoras—the largely tax-exempt assembly plants producing goods for export, including hundreds of factories along Mexico’s border with the United States.

Mexico forged ahead with the plan, signing a letter of intent to sell off 1,200 state-owned companies in 1984, and then amending the Mexican constitution in 1992 to allow the privatization of many ejidos, the campesino-controlled cooperative farms that were the heart of Mexico’s agrarian reform in the 1930s.¹³

In the early 1990s, the government of Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari negotiated a model neoliberal trade accord with the United States and Canada—the North American Free Trade Agreement, better known as NAFTA.

Mexico’s economy had shown no sign of recovery by the time NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, but the United States promoted the Mexican experience as an example for the rest of Latin America. In December 1994, U.S. president Bill Clinton hosted a “Summit of the Americas” in Miami, with thirty-four heads of state meeting to ratify a plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which was supposed to extend NAFTA to the whole hemisphere by 2005. Two weeks later, the Mexican peso collapsed. On January 31, 1995, fearing a total breakdown of the Mexican economy that would affect a large number of U.S. investors, the Clinton administration patched together a $48.8 billion bailout package of loans and credit lines for Mexico from various countries and financial institutions. The U.S. share was $20 billion.¹⁴

Under NAFTA and other trade agreements that forced the reduction or elimination of protective tariffs, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their sources of income and had to sell or abandon their farms; total agricultural employment fell from 8.1 million in the early 1990s to 5.8 million in the second quarter of 2008. Consumer prices were supposed to decline under NAFTA, yet while the prices paid to farmers for their products plummeted, consumer food prices rose in all three NAFTA countries. As of 2005, Mexican farmers earned 70 percent less for their corn than they did before NAFTA while Mexican consumers paid 50 percent more for tortillas, a corn-based staple of the Mexican diet. Without the protection of tariffs, Mexico became increasingly dependent on food imports: in 1995 the country’s grain imports jumped to ten million tons a year, from five to seven million tons previously. The dependence on imports means that when the local currency loses value against the U.S. dollar, real prices for food can double or triple.¹⁵

It’s true that the maquiladoras added some 660,000 manufacturing jobs after NAFTA took effect, but this wasn’t nearly enough to offset the loss of 2.3 million jobs in agriculture—and the maquiladora sector itself started losing jobs in 2000-2001 because of competition from countries like China.¹⁶ Meanwhile, the real purchasing power of the Mexican minimum wage fell by nearly three-fifths from 1980 to 1996.¹⁷ It continued to fall after NAFTA went into effect in 1994—by 25 percent from 1994 to 2009.¹⁸

Rising unemployment and shrinking pay resulted in a growing gap between Mexican and U.S. wages. Up to the 1970s, Mexican workers were paid about one-fourth to one-third of what their U.S. counterparts got. (The cost of living in Mexico is generally much lower than it is in the United States, although items like electronics, cars, and name-brand clothes usually cost more.) After the decline of real wages in the 1980s, Mexican workers in manufacturing in the late 1990s were making about one-eighth what they would be making for the same job in the United States; in some occupations Mexican workers were being paid one-fifteenth what they would get north of the border.¹⁹

In 1981, a Mexican factory worker could have made three or four times as much money by crossing the border, not necessarily enough of a difference to make up for the risks and hardships of immigration. Just a few years later, the same factory worker’s actual purchasing power in Mexico had dropped to about one-third of its previous level but now the worker could get paid eight to fifteen times more by going north. A 2009 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that “one of the paradoxes of NAFTA, which leaders promised would help Mexico ‘export goods, not people,’ is that Mexico now ‘exports’ more people than ever and more of them reside permanently in the United States without documents.”²⁰

Why don’t people stay home and fix their own countries?

In the 2001 documentary Uprooted: Refugees of the Global Economy, “Maricel,” an immigrant from the Philippines, tells how she ended up going overseas as a domestic worker. Seeing ads everywhere encouraging people to work abroad, and facing a lack of opportunities at home, Maricel made a tough decision. “I realized that it’s just a waste of time for me to go to college,” she said, “because those people who went to college, they wasted four years studying hard, and then they have to go abroad to work as domestics. And I said that I just don’t want to waste any more time. I’m just going to go abroad.”

At the time, the Philippines had a total foreign debt of more than $52 billion.²¹ “On top of that the economy is not doing well, and you have this loan that [has] to be paid off, and people are talking about even like ten generations will pass and we won’t be able to survive,” explains Maricel. “So, realistically speaking, when is it going to be better? Is there a possibility that the economy gets better? You’re paying the debt, and on top of it you have this big, big interest. It’s not very realistic that you will come out of it, like the Philippines will come out of it in one piece.” With no opportunities in her home country, Maricel ended up in New York City, and eventually became an organizer helping other domestic workers fight exploitation.²²

When people have no hope that things will get better, they are more likely to uproot themselves and go elsewhere to survive. If they believe they can improve the situation in their countries, they are less inclined to leave. And if things do get better in their home countries, many people who left will return.

Starting in 1910, an estimated one to one and a half million Mexicans crossed the northern border to escape the violence of the Mexican revolution. Mexico’s population was about fifteen million at the time, so this was a major migration—almost one out of every ten Mexicans. But many returned to Mexico once the violence let up and the revolution opened new opportunities back home, including social programs such as a sweeping agrarian reform.²³

What happens when people do try to fix their countries?

In the Central American nation of Nicaragua, an earthquake struck on December 23, 1972, killing as many as 10,000 people and destroying or damaging about 80 percent of the buildings in the center of the capital city, Managua. The country’s U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, funneled much of the international aid into his own family’s pockets, leaving the population without help. Yet the disaster did not provoke a massive wave of migration. A movement to overthrow Somoza had been building for the past decade, and many Nicaraguans stayed home to push for change.²⁴

Washington continued to support Somoza, despite the earthquake aid debacle and a series of worsening human rights abuses, but in the end it could no longer prop him up against widespread opposition. On July 19, 1979, an insurrection led by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled Somoza and began to transform Nicaragua from a dictator’s feudal estate into a real country, with political pluralism and a “mixed economy” based on the economic models of countries like France and Sweden, which combine public and private ownership of important economic sectors.²⁵

Nicaragua’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by a total of 7.67 percent per capita from 1979 to 1983; this was at a time when the real GDP fell by 14.71 percent per capita for Central America as a whole.²⁶ But with fiercely anti-communist Ronald Reagan as president, the U.S. government chose not to tolerate the way Nicaraguans were fixing their country; it started funneling money, weapons, training, and other “assistance” to recruit local fighters, known as the contras, for a proxy war that targeted civilian supporters of the Sandinista government. The war halted economic progress. Eleven years and some 30,000 deaths later, the United States won its war of attrition when Nicaraguans, tired of fighting, voted the FSLN out of office in February 1990.

For all their struggles and sacrifice, Nicaraguans were cheated out of the chance to fix their country. The new U.S.-backed government quickly imposed IMF-sponsored “structural adjustment” programs that brought a sharp rise in unemployment and triggered a recession, plunging the already impoverished population into desperate misery. Many Nicaraguans fled to neighboring Costa Rica, whose 1984 census counted 45,918 Nicaraguans; by 2000 the country had 226,374 Nicaraguan residents, two-thirds of whom said they had arrived during the 1990s.²⁷

In El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. government backed right-wing regimes as they tried to crush revolutionary leftist movements similar to Nicaragua’s. These wars ended with peace accords—in 1992 in El Salvador and in 1996 in Guatemala—that allowed the leftist forces to regroup as political parties. But 70,000 Salvadorans and 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed, the vast majority of them by the U.S.-backed regimes, which remained in power and began imposing neoliberal economic programs. The wars left deep wounds in the countries’ social and economic fabric. By 2005, El Salvador’s homicide rate of fifty-four murders per 100,000 people was the highest in Latin America;²⁸ nearly half of the country’s rural population lived below the poverty line, and 61 percent had no access to water piped into the home.²⁹

The U.S. Census reported that 44,166 Nicaraguans were living in the United States in 1980, shortly after the overthrow of the Somoza regime; the number jumped to 168,659 over the next decade. The number of Salvadorans living in the United States rose from 94,447 in 1980 to 465,433 in 1990, and the number of Guatemalans went from 63,073 to 225,739 during the same period, when the wars in those countries were at their worst. The numbers rose almost as much again during the 1990s, as neoliberal economic programs were imposed: by 2000 there were 220,335 Nicaraguans, 817,336 Salvadorans, and 480,665 Guatemalans in the United States.³⁰

Haitians suffered a similar fate. In December 1990, Haitians seized an opportunity for change, overwhelmingly electing popular priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Turnout was about 63 percent of eligible voters, according to official figures, with 67.5 percent voting for Aristide, compared to 14.2 percent for his closest competitor. Haitians hoped Aristide would carry out his promises to oppose IMF programs and raise the standard of living in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

But less than a year later, in September 1991, Aristide was overthrown in a military coup. Army officers and right-wing paramilitaries unleashed massive repression against grassroots and leftist activists. According to reports judged credible by Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded the main paramilitary leader, Emmanuel Constant. The military regime and its supporters killed an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people before being forced to give up power in September 1994.³¹ Their hopes for change crushed, Haitians fled. U.S. Coast Guard data showed a notable drop of migrants fleeing Haiti by boat after the December 1990 elections, followed by a dramatic upturn after the 1991 coup.³²

Aristide was returned to office in October 1994 after then-president Bill Clinton ordered a U.S. military intervention—once Aristide had agreed to a U.S.-inspired neoliberal economic program, including a “drastic reduction” of the tariffs that protected Haitian food producers from foreign competition. Many Haitian farmers, especially rice producers, were forced out of business, and Haitians became largely dependent on imported rice. Clinton later apologized for the tariff reduction policy. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did,” he told the U.S. Senate in March 2010.³³

Haitian migration to the United States swelled after the 1991 coup, and continued as the 1994 neoliberal program took effect. About 200,000 people born in Haiti lived in the United States in 1990. By 2009, that number had reached nearly half a million.³⁴

Why are children coming here from Central America?

Although the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States fell by nearly one million after 2008, in the middle of 2014 there was a sharp rise in unauthorized border crossing by children. Most came from Mexico and three Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency detained 57,525 unaccompanied children—those traveling without a parent or guardian—at the Mexico-U.S. border from October 2013 through June 2014, more than twice as many as for the same period the year before. The number of children apprehended with a parent or guardian also jumped dramatically: 22,069 accompanied children were detained from October 2013 to June 2014, almost three times the number for the year before. About 16 percent of the unaccompanied children were under the age of thirteen, as were a full 81 percent of the children who were accompanied by a parent or a legal guardian. The upsurge in child migration started tapering off in the second half of 2014.³⁵

Poverty and fear of violence seemed to be the main reasons for this sudden increase in child migrants. In March 2014 the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, reported the results of a survey it had made of underage immigrants from Mexico and the three Central American countries. The researchers found that “no less than 58 percent of the 404 children interviewed were forcibly displaced because they suffered or feared harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.” A survey of 322 underage migrants from El Salvador published by the Immigration Policy Center in June 2014 found that “59 percent of Salvadoran boys and 61 percent of Salvadoran girls list[ed] crime, gang threats, or violence as a reason for their emigration.”

The UNHCR report noted that the increase in migration from the three Central American countries wasn’t just affecting the United States. Asylum requests by people from these countries to Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama jumped by 435 percent from 2009 to 2012.³⁶

Experts on Central American history noted that continuing effects of the wars of the 1980s and the neoliberal policies of the 1990s had contributed to high poverty and crime rates in Central America.³⁷ Political repression added to the new level of violence in the area, especially in Mexico and Honduras, and so did a militarized approach to fighting the trafficking of drugs through the region to the United States. More than 60,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico from 2007 to 2014, but instead of stopping the drug cartels, the fighting in Mexico just seemed to encourage the spread of narco-trafficking into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. government had helped fund this militarized approach since 2007 through a $2.5 billion program, the Mérida Initiative.³⁸

In Honduras another factor was government corruption following a 2009 military coup. Despite evidence of links between security forces and drug gangs, the Honduran military continues to get millions in U.S. aid. As of 2014, Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. A Human Rights Watch report noted “rampant crime and impunity for human rights abuses,” including violent attacks on journalists and peasant organizers.³⁹

How can we address the root causes of immigration?

Many people around the world are trying, often at great personal risk, to build a better future for themselves, their families and their communities, and a more equitable society for everyone. Those of us who live in the United States can join them in these efforts, generally without risking our lives.

During the 1980s, many thousands of people in the United States spoke out against their government’s intervention in Central America. Activists protested and lobbied Congress; many traveled to Central America to provide assistance and bring back information on conditions in the region, seriously undercutting the Reagan administration’s public relations campaign to depict Central American leftists as a threat to the United States. This activism seems to have had an impact on public opinion: a New York Times/CBS poll in April 1986 showed some 62 percent of U.S. respondents opposed financial aid to the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua, while just 25 percent supported it.⁴⁰

In the early 1990s, labor unions and activists led a campaign against NAFTA, and in late 1999, giant protests erupted in Seattle against the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), sparking a new “anti-globalization” movement in the United States. These protests took their lead from workers in Latin America and elsewhere, who had long been out in the streets fighting the same policies. Mexicans organized innumerable marches, rallies, strikes, sit-ins, and occupations of government buildings in the 1990s. Thousands of indigenous farmers rose up in southern Mexico on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect. Naming their movement the Zapatistas—after Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata—they denounced the trade pact as a “death sentence” for indigenous people.⁴¹

Starting in the mid-1990s, campus and labor activists in the United States built an anti-sweatshop movement that has made important gains in supporting successful local worker-organizing campaigns in Latin America and throughout the world.

For example, in 2002 and 2003 a group called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) exerted pressure through its Sweat-Free Campus Campaign to help workers at the BJ&B factory in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic win the first union in a Caribbean “Free Trade Zone” in five years. The company closed the plant in 2007, despite international pressure to keep it open, but the factory reopened in 2010 under an agreement that South Carolina–based Knights Apparel signed with the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent U.S.-based monitoring organization, in collaboration with the former union leaders. Knights Apparel rehired some of the laid-off workers to produce college-logo apparel for a new “fair trade” brand, Alta Gracia. The workers are paid a living wage—three times higher than the country’s minimum—and their union contract also guarantees health and safety standards and fair treatment.⁴²

Such efforts are continuing. In November 2013 two major apparel manufacturers, Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc. and Kentuckybased Fruit of the Loom, announced that they would require their Haitian suppliers to stop violating the country’s minimum wage laws. This followed a long-term campaign by Dominican, Haitian, Honduran, and Nicaraguan unions backed by Canadian and U.S. antisweatshop activists to end labor violations by Gildan and its suppliers.⁴³

USAS and other groups have also been working to get U.S. brands to sign a legally binding agreement protecting worker safety in the Bangladeshi garment industry following the deaths of at least 1,129 people in the April 2013 collapse of a factory building at Rana Plaza in Dhaka. As of June 2014 the campaign had succeeded in convincing seventeen college clothing brands to sign the accord, while twenty-three universities had agreed to require their brands to sign it.⁴⁴ Worldwide, 200 companies have signed the accord.⁴⁵

Major unions in the United States and Europe are also backing labor struggles in other countries, often by linking up with local unions. In October 2014, the Metal Workers Union of the Philippines (MWAP) won a new collective bargaining agreement for its members employed by Dutch multinational NXP Semiconductors, a supplier to Apple. The contract included reinstatement for twelve union officers and “decent severance” for another twelve who had been fired in a union-busting move. The union called the victory a “showcase of what international solidarity can do.” It thanked the Geneva-based international union IndustriALL and online campaign organizations like SumOfUs, which mobilized 150,000 supporters to write to Apple, for putting pressure on NXP to respect workers’ rights.⁴⁶

In early 2015 a newly formed Panamanian dockworkers union, SINTRAPORSPA (Sindicato Industrial de Trabajadores/as Portuarios y Similares de Panamá), won a contract from a subsidiary of the Hong Kong–based Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH). The agreement would raise wages by 27 percent over the next four years. The Panamanian union is affiliated with a major U.S.-based dockworkers union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which had helped the Panamanian workers in their fight for union recognition.⁴⁷