By Amanda Wilson
For the Salisbury Post
The construction of a major barrier on the United States’ southern border is well under way.
But Guadalupe Castillo, a professor of history and border expert at Pima County Community College in Tucson, Ariz., says construction of a border fence will not provide American with a viable, long-term solution.
Effective immigration policy should examine the root causes of immigration in the “sender countries,” she said. A life-long resident of the borderlands, Castillo believes the issue of illegal immigration must be viewed in a larger context.
“After 1994 when NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was implemented, we began to see the impact it had in the rural communities of Mexico,” she said.
Castillo said NAFTA disrupted delicate local economies in Mexico by flooding the countryside with cheap, subsidized agricultural products like corn and beans from the United States. It also facilitated the privatization of the “ajidos”, or traditional community-owned lands, which began the destruction of Mexican village communities, Castillo says.
“Many of those community members began to move into the cities of Mexico, and many of them began to move up into the north and crossing the border into the United States,” she said.
Castillo said NAFTA allows for the free flow of capital but not the free flow of labor. Building a fence or tightening up domestic enforcement-only policies will not resolve this contradiction, she said.
Instead of focusing on the larger economic and social issues, the U.S. is building even more infrastructure, a process she says amounts to militarization.
“As long as the United States ignores the realities of the sender areas, as to why it is people leave their countries and what they are facing there, there will never be a resolution,” she says.