US economic dependence on migrant workers notes

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U.S. agriculture dependent on migrant workers
http://www.reuters.com/article/consumerproducts-SP-A/idUSN1526113420070724
· Latinos are doing all the labor-intensive crop work even a sthe US grapples with the fallout of a failed attempt to overhaul immigration policy
· US agriculture is totally dependent on migrant labor.
· “If the Mexican farm laborers all went back tomorrow, the US farm system would collapse,” said Bobbie Brown, a crop farmer in the lower Rio Grande Valley along the Texas/Mexico border.
· The industry view is that Mexico has the labor, Mexicans need the work, and Americans don’t want to do these jobs. So some kind of immigration reform is required.
· Industry officials maintain that the labor shortage is worsening because the children of migrant workers are enjoying the life their parents toiled for.

Mexico Dangerously Dependent On Flight of Migrant Workers to America http://www.watchingamerica.com/lajornada000007.html
· Export of manual laborers is recorded by the Fox (Mexico’s) government as “change” and as though it were a “success” of its social and labor policies.
· In the last 4 ½ years Mexico has received 52 billion dollars in reminttances.
· The questions is if Mexico has enough money to promote community development and generate jobs, why are they “exporting” their people to the US?
· Immigrants represent 3.5% of all manual labor in the US; in agriculture immigrants are 25% of the manual labor.
· Latin America and the Caribbean received the largest volume of remittances.

Transient Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program for Exploiting Mexican and Central American Workers http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107vogel.htm
· Almost 80% of the total of unauthorized migrants from all over the world that reside and work in the US are from Mexico and other Latin American (primarily Central American) countries.
· The manpower demand produced by the First World War led to the active recruitment of laborers in Mexico.
· The institutionalization of Mexican workers as a reserve labor pool for US capitalism has produced waves of migration to the North which has eventually led to deportation waves also.

Farmers in Colorado Struggle with Labor Shortagehttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec07/farmers_08-20.html
· Many of the farmers have cut back roughly 50 percent of what they would normally produce. And that’s because they’re expecting about 50 percent of the available labor that they’re used to having, and there’s no sense in putting a lot of investment into the land, into the crops, and only getting half of it back.
· My worst fear is to lose a percent, significant percent of my people in the middle of narvest. And because our income—70 percent of my income is generated in six weeks. And if that falls apart, there’s no way to recoup that.” Colorado farmer
· So last year farmers brought in more than 59,000 agricultural works from outside the US legally. Farmers have to pay the government to bring in these workers.

Channeling the Remittance Flood
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf20051228_4272.htm
· Ramirez is one of an estimated 11 million workers living in the US – some legally and some illegally—who are expected to send a record $20 billion to Mexico, a 20% increase over last year.
· As a whole, Latin America and the Caribbean have an estimated 25 million citizens living abroad, of whom some 20 million send home $2500 a year on average.
· A group of 100 Hondurans living in New York formed the New Horizons Investment Club, which invests in the stock market and busy Bronx rental properties. The club uses the proceeds to develop job-creating tourism projects in their Honduran Atlantic-coast hometown.
· As Mexican families have fewer children, the number of young workers who will journey north of the US border will start declining over the next 10 years.

Article: US helped create migrant flow; labor demands of two world wars; NAFTA inequities drew workers borders (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_41_42/ai_n17093151/print)
· US is responsible for today’s immigration flow
· Inconsistent immigration policies over the past century combined with significant US involvement in shaping Mexico’s economic policies have much to do with the current immigration crisis
· In the late 1880s, the US began recruiting workers from Mexico to fuel the growth of the railroad, agriculture and mining
· While we try to keep migrant workers out, the labor shortage over the last 10 years pulls them in
· NAFTA gave the promise that Mexico would be able to export goods and not people, but that has not happened
· Mexico’s growth rate under NAFTA has been half what it was supposed to be so people have to come to the US for work

Migrant workers aid growth at home (http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/business/4349979.s)

· Mexican laborer Antonio Villalobos sends $150 to his family in Mexico each week. His family relies on this money.
· This money, and money send home by all migrant workers, helps to find the war on poverty in Mexico.
· The Mexican government is trying a plan where they match every $1 contributed back into the Mexican economy with $3, but much of the money seems to get lost to fee-charging financiers and the money is not used well.
· The US requires that workers in the US carry an identification card in order to transfer money back into Mexico. Many workers are afraid to carry these id cards but this just increases the dependence of the workers on the US

Dirt-cheap day labor (http://articles/moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveMoney/DirtCheapDay/Labor.asp)
· There are many jobs considered too small to attract contractors and there’s a ready pool of cheap labor in the form of migrant workers.
· This creates an underground economy. One day last year there were 117,600 day laborers working or looking for jobs at 500 sites. ¾ of them were undocumented workers.

Economic Development and International Migration in Comparative Perspective by Douglas Massey
· Economic development is the application of capital to raise human productivity, generate wealth and increase national increase.
· Economic growth depends not only on amounts of labor and capital, but also on institutional, cultural and technological factors that determine how labor and capital are used.
· Immigration from developing countries stems from a lack of economic development within these developing countries.
· To control immigration, need to promote economic development in these countries.

Towards a fair deal for migrant workers in the global economy (http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public---dgreporte/---acomm/documents/meetingdocument/ka0096.pdf)
· Trade, like migration, involves the movement of labor since good traded include labor so some economists look at trade as a substitute for migration.
· Migration though may have a perverse impact on trade because if it raises the exchange rate then the countries might decide to reduce exports and increase imports.
· NAFTA may have led to greater, not less, migration between the United States and Mexico.

CRS Report for Congress (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32934.pdf)
· Mexico has over 100 million people and a free market economy.
· Economic conditions in Mexico are important to the US because of the close trade and investment interactions and because of other social and political issues like immigration which are affected by economic conditions.
· Because of NAFTA, the economic relationship between the US and Mexico has strengthened.

The Value of Undocumented Workers (http://www.ailf.org/ipc.policy_reports_2002_value.asp)
· The US has relied on Mexican migrant workers to fill domestic labor shortages in nearly every area of US commerce for nearly a century.
· US economic progress and stability can be greatly enhanced by the contributions of immigrant labor.
· A mid-range estimate of 7.8 million total undocumented workers in the US, says that 4.5 million are from Mexico, while the remaining 3.3 million are of other nationalities.
· B Lindsay Lowell, director of research at the Pew Hispanic Center, calculates that there are nearly 5 million undocumented workers in the US economy. He believes that these estimates prove immigrant workers to be a very substantial presence in sectors where they are concentrated. More than a million unauthorized works are employed in manufacturing and a similar number in the service industry. More than 600,000 work in construction and more than 700,000 in restaurants.
· 1 to 1.4 million are employed in agriculture

Migration Information Source (http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/print.cfm?!D=638)
· The number of migrant workers in the unions have increased and unions now support proimmigrant policies.
· Nearly 1 in 10 foreign-born wage and salary workers was a union member in 2006.
· This number increased to 15.4 percent in 2006.
· The number of foreign born has increased 30 percent while the number of native born union workers has declined 9 percent.

Economic consequences of migration (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights)
· Immigration increases productivity versus immigration has an adverse effect on the economy.
· Unraveling the consequences of immigration on the economy is a very difficult task; there often is not enough good evidence.
· Migrant workers compete with local workers and migrant workers are often willing to accept lower wages, etc. and these wages are often for jobs local workers don’t want to do
· Immigrants not only occupy jobs, they also create them
· If they perform domestic labor, they can actually help local labor get jobs.
· Being willing to accept lower wages actually helps some companies stay in business.
· More migrant workers raise the consumption level which raises the economy.

Migration and Global Economics (Interfaith US Trade Justice Campaign)
· NAFTA has caused an increase in immigration
· If immigrants did not perform the job functions they do, the US economy would not be able to function