David Bacon, a Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute, has written a timely and insightful commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle on the link the between free trade deals and forced displacement leading to immigration.
Bacon writes, "Fourteen years ago, the promoters of the North American Free Trade Agreement promised that free trade would produce jobs. We hear the same claim today for the agreement with Peru, as well as the other agreements Bush has negotiated with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. NAFTA certainly produced some winners. Large corporations moved high paying jobs south of the U.S.-Mexico border in order to cut their labor costs and increase their profits. Mexico created a new generation of billionaires. But rising profits did not produce jobs."
Bacon elaborated on these points at keynote talk he gave at the Lessons from NAFTA conference we organized last month in Minneapolis. You can hear Bacon's talk here.
Bacon's commentary in the Chronicle concludes with a dire warning for Democrats in 2008, "Party strategists think Democrats can accept big contributions to support the Bush free trade program. They calculate that unions, workers, displaced immigrants and those hurt by the treaties have nowhere else to go in 2008. They're wrong. They could stay home - the Democrats certainly won't be giving them much reason to get out and vote."
