Published in The Christian Century , September 18, 2007 ON JUNE 28, President Bush's grand bargain with Congress over immigration reform legislation collapsed. The event is best understood not as a failure of short-term political leadership, but rather as an inevitable long-term consequence of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the historic overhaul of hemispheric economic policies initiated by the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1994. NAFTA's architects allowed themselves one false assumption. They believed that as goods and services began to flow in unprecedented volume throughout the world's largest free market, one commodity--low-wage labor--would remain largely fixed. Unfortunately, when NAFTA unleashed the forces of the free market, those forces did exactly what they should have been expected to do: they uprooted longstanding social and economic arrangements in Mexico and caused the already meager economic opportunities, especially in the rural parts of ...
Life & Death, Faith & Doubt, Here & There