An Attemp at Issue Discussion - Immigration

I missed it and it has now been covered up by the primary wars. It was a very fine article on the issue of immigration entitled South of the Border: Another view on immigration that discussed the actual economic issues as opposed to the usual posturing bull manure.  The point (as interpreted by me) was that the immigration problem can only be cured by curing the poverty that exists south of our borders.  The point was also made that NAFTA and other, so called, trade agreements have made matters a lot worse.  And in focusing on this latter point we may be able to develop an understanding of what will be necessary to address the former (the curing of the poverty).  So I will get the bad stuff out of the way first:  The culture of those living south of the border seems to produce a very high birth rate and a very large population.  And there is very little that the American people can do about that unless  education provides an answer.  But this actually brings us to the positive part of this diary.  Read on, McDuff...

While most of us were asleep and/or tending to our own corn patch, NAFTA, snuck by us as a simple trade agreement that would allow the industrialization of Mexico.  The removal of tariffs was sold as a way to create jobs in Mexico thereby relieving the poverty of Mexico and allowing the people of Mexico to stay in their homeland and have a productive and rewarding life.  It was all sweetness and light and a win win deal.

But NAFTA was not just the removal of tariffs. If that were the case then NAFTA, sold as an INCREASE in jobs in Mexico would have been a limited "success".  As it turned out even this claim was a lie in that the result of removing the tariffs, far from creating additional job opportunities, simply outsourced American jobs to Mexico ("that giant sucking sound").  The worst of it was not ever discussed and thus never considered by the American people:  NAFTA allowed  the free use of financial capital and the consolidation and unemployment that went with it especially in the agricultural sector. The result of that was the consolidation and mechanization of small farms that resulted in unemployment for a great many agricultural workers.  Meanwhile, other "free trade" agreements moved manufacturing jobs from Mexico to China.  The result was an outsourcing of the American manufacturing livelihood to Mexico for only a very brief instant before the those jobs ended up in other locales.

If you want to put the genie back in the bottle there is a way to do it.  It cannot be done by the American people however and it cannot be done as long as Chavez of Venezuela is being painted as Satan incarnate.  And there is no way in hell that a Republican party will tolerate it.  Because part of the solution is a higher degree of what American pseudo-capitalists will term "socialism "in Mexico.  To put the point quite finely, the egalitarian redistribution of resource extraction revenue and land rents will do more to alleviate the problems in Mexico than anything else could ever do.  The consolidated farms must be pseudo nationalized and the corruption that pervades the national oil company must cease. The pseudo-nationalization of the farms is a rather simple matter.  It amounts to a national ad valorem tax on the value of land and use of the proceeds to grant a monthly citizen's dividend in equal share to all the citizens of Mexico.  What this does is to redistribute a major portion of the gains from consolidation and mechanization to the citizens instead of sending those gains to Wall Street USA.  In the broader sense it delivers the birthright of all Mexican citizens to them (it is their land and their oil) and so long as there is still a profit for actual farming and oil extraction then those enterprises will continue.  And the profit need not be very much.

But let us suppose that I am wrong (which I am not).  If I am wrong the land will be abandoned by Wall Street and go back to the small farms economy.  For the Mexican people there just isn't a downside on this deal.  Believe me when I tell you (and on this I admit I am guessing), the people who become migrant workers do not own the farmland.  But then again, I don't really KNOW that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.

Land rent and the value of oil is the result of population growth (demand).  There is no "supply side" of this equation in that the amount of natural resources is "fixed". No amount of investment or labor will create any more land or oil.  And as the value of the resource is determined purely by demand while the supply is totally inelastic, then proceeds from the use of the resource belong to the entire population within the sovereignty where the resource is located.