LATIN AMERICA: Labour and Immigration, the New North-South Debate

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Mar 16 1995 (IPS) - Latin America’s governments have tended to take an ostrich-like stance regarding the dangers hanging over the region with the gradual conversion of the issues of immigration and labour in a new North-South conflict.

A high-level inter-governmental meeting to be held in April in Santiago de Chile on the new issues of trade negotiation will be a first step towards attending to a debate that connects emigration, employment and so-called “social dumping.”

The only tool available to regional governments to control the exodus of emigrants by means of an improvement in living conditions is insertion into northern markets.

But, somewhat paradoxically, that mechanism for favouring more and better employment in the region’s countries and thus stemming undesired waves of emigration is blocked by the North’s protectionism, which justifies itself by calling the lower wages and poorer working conditions in the South “unfair competition.”

“The issue of labour has burst upon the global agenda, whether we like it or not, and has come to stay for a long time,” Manuela Rangel, director of economic affairs for the Latin American Economic System (SELA) – which is organising the April meeting – told IPS.

Rangel pointed out that not only in the United States are labour rights a new factor that plays an increasingly important role in negotiations with the region, but also a dominant theme among the European Union’s 15 member nations.

Labour conditions will also be on the agenda of the World Trade Organisation, where the industrialised North is seeking to justify protectionist measures by the lower wages paid in the South.

Philippe de Villiers, the French far right’s new leader, is calling for protectionist barriers against the “social dumping” practiced by the developing South, arguing that “it is intolerable that 90 Philippine workers are worth the same as one Breton.”

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, neoliberalism’s standard- bearer in the region, argues that it is short-sighted to fail to understand that for the South to become a market, the North must buy its lower-cost products.

The director of the International Labour Organisation, Michel Hansenne, said an increase in North-South trade will bring manufacturing jobs to the South because of low wages, but will also open innumerable business opportunities in the North, creating a new generation of jobs in the future.

But meanwhile, the drop in employment and in the quality of jobs is a charged subject in industrialised countries, and the global unemployment crisis the most severe since the 1930s, with a total of 825 million people un- or under-employed, he added.

According to Rangel, unemployment becomes an issue because of the North’s loss of competitivity, “in the face of which it is easiest to blame the ‘other’, and in this case the ‘other’ is immigration, cheap labour from over there that takes away our jobs here.”

That mindset is what has put the issue of labour on the international agenda, and Latin America must prepare itself to face the issue, “because it is connected to exports and insertion into global markets.

“The only option left us is to use their same arguments and weapons and answer that inefficiency is the cause of their loss of competitivity. Meanwhile, we in the South have to unite against their pretension that we have similar wages and working conditions,” Rangel added.

Luis Marius, assistant general secretary of the Latin American Workers Central (CLAT), said he is in favour of discussing the issue of labour, as long as it is treated in all its aspects, not only economic but also social.

The issue must be faced but without “restricting it to wages, and leaving out aspects such as social security and development policies,” Marius told IPS.

He stressed that it is impossible to talk about egalitarianism when the cost of the man-hour varies so widely: 52 dollars in Germany, 38 in the rest of the EU, 36 in the United States, and 32 in Japan.

On the other hand, the cost is 50 dollars in Latin America – but per month rather than hour, he added.

According to Marius, industrialised nations insist on Latin America strictly following neoliberal policies and throwing its markets open, while they refuse to do the same. “Let’s begin there with egalitarianism,” he remarked.

In relations with the United States, the overlapping of the issues of labour and immigration plays an increasingly important role.

A majority of the region’s emigrants head to the United States. According to conservative figures, a million Latin Americans attempt to cross the border illegally every year.

The result is initiatives to deny basic rights to undocumented workers – such as California’s law 187 – which lead to attempts by the government to make immigration tougher, rather than attempting to avert the tendency towards discrimination.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States was partly motivated by a desire to stem the clandestine exodus from Mexico to its northern neighbour, where it is estimated some five million Mexicans and 15 million of their descendants live, former Venezuelan foreign minister Simon Consalvi told IPS.

President Bill Clinton seems to understand that a real solution to unwanted immigration is to create jobs in Mexico, but to defend NAFTA he must confront popular concerns and a hostile congress which opposes the free trade bloc, said Consalvi.

Another high-level SELA official, Allan Wagner, said the United States has double standards in terms of demanding labour rights clauses in relations with the region, because the U.S. government provides strong support to inefficient sectors, with no economic justification.

U.S. immigration commissioner Doris Meissner confirmed the equation “more and better jobs mean less immigration” when she denounced on Mar. 14 that the Mexican crisis led to an immediate increase in “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande.