4 HAWAII FILIPINO CHRONICLE FEBRUARY 13 , 2010
COVER STORY
A Nation Divided: Immigration Reform and What It Means for Your Family By Danny de Gracia, II
ith the effects of the global financial meltdown hitting hard against the U.S. economy and the Global War On Terror entering its ninth year with no end in sight, one of the greatest challenges that faces policy makers is how to balance the demands of a fair and equitable immigration policy with the realities of border control, resource scarcity and the future of the American way of life.
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It is presently estimated that some 600,000 legal immigrants enter the U.S. each year, while another 700,000 – 1.5 million illegally enter America to join 20 million other illegals already in the country. While policymakers struggle with these challenges, one thing is certain—something must be done before the system completely collapses. Filipinos need to know the truth on the immigration crisis: why it exists, who is responsible and should not shy away from demanding immediate action.
Globalization and Poor Domestic Policy: Drivers for Crisis Of the 600,000 legal immigrants who enter the U.S. each year, only 40,000–80,000 are Filipinos choosing to take residence primarily in California or Hawaii. Three quarters of Filipinos who come to America are sponsored or are immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, while the remaining quarter come for employment. The majority of immigrants, both legal and illegal, come from Mexico. The deluge of persons crossing the 2,000-mile U.S.-
Mexico border is the spotlight that has brought so much media and policymaker attention to the immigration issue. But why does this crisis exist? Just how did the system break?
NAFTA The first reason for the immigration crisis is the planetary political trend towards globalization. In 1994, the highly controversial and divisive North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entered into effect. NAFTA, which received bipartisan opposition in the U.S. especially from labor unions,
was touted by former Vice President Al Gore and other proponents of a “new world order” of global integration as being a means to increase collective prosperity. In reality, NAFTA only served to impoverish both the U.S. and Mexico. While much of the contemporary rage in the immigration debate has been against Mexicans, the real rage should be against the framers of the NAFTA agreement and the large banks that profited as a result of it. NAFTA stacked the cards against Mexican small business owners in agriculture by allowing U.S. taxpayer subsidized agri-megacorporations to compete directly with Mexican farmers, which drove some 2 million Mexicans out of business and off their land, while simulta-
neously driving up the cost of indigenous Mexican products such as tortillas as high as 50 percent. An estimated 28,000 Mexican small businesses were also annihilated by “big box” U.S. companies, which set up shop in Mexico and hired cheap labor from China instead of Mexican citizens. Rather than improving the wages of Mexicans, fallout from NAFTA caused them to crash and burn, resulting in desperation that drove many to immigrate to America, both legally and illegally, resulting in the massive influx of immigrants that now strain the system to the limit.
“Draconian Immigration” Policy The second leg of the pres-