Maïka Sondarjee is an assistant professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She directed the collective work Feminist approaches in international relations (PUM, 2022), and she wrote the book lose the south (Écosociété Editions, 2020).
Once again, human lives have been suffocated in the trailer of a truck that is too hot, of a system that is too violent. Dehydrated and neglected. To cross the border from Mexico to Texas, they sat curled up, together in misfortune.
Men and women, 27 from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, 7 from Guatemala, 2 from El Salvador and 3 whose origin has yet to be determined. For the most part without identity papers on them… their families do not wait for the bad news.
The response from the authorities and the media, as usual, is to blame the smugglers, those who took them across the border. To accuse this driver who left their blood boiling in the back and his two acolytes who promised them sea and world is understandable, but too easy.
Authorities in France and England did the same in November last year, in response to the sinking of 27 people in an inflatable boat in the English Channel. These Iraqi Kurds had also shown too much trust in ill-intentioned individuals. However, if we rightly accuse those who profit from a system, we hardly question the system itself.
“Poverty and despair”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador cited poverty and despair as the explanation for last Monday’s tragedy in San Antonio. But where does this poverty and despair come from? In particular, growing inequalities between the countries of the Global North and the Global South, often caused by free trade policies that disadvantage Mexico to the benefit of the United States.
Since the establishment of NAFTA in 1994 (CUSMA since 2018), American companies have populated Mexico with make-up, factories largely exempt from tariffs, where conditions are well below US standards. Washington DC has long subsidized products like corn to help American producers beat Mexican produce, or funded companies to dump surplus food into Mexico in an effort to destroy industries. of its economy.
According to a 2010 study on the impacts of NAFTA, Mexican farmers lost an average of US$1 billion per year between 1997 and 2005, mostly related to the corn industry. The poverty and inequality that this agreement has created is difficult to calculate. And this is of course coupled with a growing problem of internal security and criminality in the country.
The existence of “rich” and “poor” countries is not a coincidence of fate: some get richer at the expense of others. The capitalist system is like this, since the quest for profit encourages business owners and governments to accumulate capital to the detriment of the living conditions of workers, especially those “abroad”. With growing inequalities, it should come as no surprise that some people are desperate for the opportunities that migration brings. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center based on 1,000 interviews, almost three in five Mexicans (57%) believe that those who migrate to the United States have a “better life”.
Policies that are too strict
My father had the same idea when he followed his brother Nazir from Antananarivo to Sherbrooke in search of this financial security and this “better life”. They have since contributed in their fair measure to the economy of their adopted country, just like their brothers and their sister. However, with the withdrawal into oneself visible in several countries, the security means of immigrating are dwindling.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has accused US President Joe Biden of being responsible for last Monday’s tragedy. Yet he didn’t have the same grudges against President Donald Trump in 2017, when 10 people locked in a trailer died the same way in the parking lot of a Walmart in San Antonio. The White House has successively tightened security at the Mexican border and limited access to the residence card. We criminalize human beings to the point that they have to find other ways to immigrate.
This desire to change country would therefore not cause so many deaths if migration policies had not been toughened in recent years. Several aspects of these policies need to be reviewed. For example, the fact that only 5,000 people without university degrees can receive a residence card annually, that the quotas by country and by profession are too static, that those who have lived in the United States for decades do not automatically have access to citizenship, or that the American president has the power to deport people at will.
Ironically, country closure policies related to COVID-19 have also contributed to an increase in irregular immigration. In May alone, 240,000 people were detained for attempting to cross from Mexico to the United States. This is almost the total population of Longueuil. Last year, 650 people died while making the irregular journey across the US southern border. And the smugglers are not (the only ones) to blame.