Preventing Illegal Immigration
Summarized from article on immigration issues by Tim Padgett in Oct. 15, 2007 America magazine.
Internal
reforms in the local economy of Mexico are a much more effective means
of preventing illegal immigration to the US than law-enforcement
approaches to border policing by the US, according to Mexican
journalists and policymakers. Even the conservative president of Mexico,
Calderon, was so strongly challenged in the 2006 elections by leftist
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, that Calderon had to co-opt some of
Obrador's rhetoric in order to win.
Microcredit, small business
loans to the most remote and economically depressed regions, got a boost
when Bangladeshi micro-credit guru Muhammed Yunus won the Nobel prize
for economics. It fills a great need in Mexico. Banking and credit
resources are sparse there; in the developed world, there are usually
fewer than 2000 people per bank branch, but in some Mexican states like
Oaxaca, the number is 38,000. And Mexico's banks virtually shut out
small enterprises with exorbitant interest and lots of red tape. Though
the country's financial system is one of the hemisphere's largest, it
actually loans very little to its own economy, and virtually none in the
rural areas where most illegal immigrants come from.
Many of
those immigrants are now doing what old-line banks won't: pooling funds
to start micro-credit banks to help fund local businesses that allow
residents to work at home instead of travelling to the US to make a
living. 95% of the loans made by a microbank in Santa Cruz Mixtepec, in
the southern Oaxacan mountains, have been repaid on time so far.
The
sorts of businesses funded by these microloans include a metal
window-frame shop, tomato greenhouses, and other products which local
consumers can utilize. Thus, profits are not drained away to overseas
multinational corporations, but instead reinvested in other local
concerns, and these loans have a ripple effect throughout the local
economies, in contrast to US-free-trade-policy-supported
border-dwelling, polluting maquilladoro factories. NAFTA has failed as a
solution to illegal immigration because the wealth it creates does not
flow through Mexico's economic bloodstream and create incentives for
Mexicans to stay home. A multi-billion-dollar fence might make
xenophobes feel safer, but the money would be better channeled into
foreign aid for the microbanks loaning to small businesses in the
interior of Mexico, and to pressure the Mexican government to help, too.