Freezers over Walls and the Inextricable Link between Corn & Immigration Policy
The warehouse is sticky with heat, and we are all crouched on the cement floor, watching the engineer take final measurements for the icebox. Mario, the secretary of the Cooperative Pescadores de Guadalupe, stands by the door with his arms crossed. He’s wearing a straw sombrero and a bored expression, looking skeptical that this abandoned warehouse will ever be a flourishing fish production factory. One of the older members of the co-op, Mario has watched his rural Mexican home wither and shrivel up over the past three decades and has little patience for change. He is a fisherman who just wants to fish.
The Cooperative Pescadores de Guadalupe is a co-op of 19 fishermen in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, Mexico. These fishermen live in debt to an “acopiador,” a middleman purchaser who has set up a predatory lending business on the shore. He gives them fishing nets and boat motor oil and they give him 80% of what they catch. It is the only means of survival for most of these fisherman, who would have no other funds for the equipment they need to feed their families and no means of transporting their fish to the markets. We have $150,000 pesos, approximately $8,000 USD, to turn an empty warehouse into a processing and freezing facility for the fish. The idea is simple but has profound implications — once they have a freezer, the members of the co-op will be able to sell their own fish and eventually break their debt cycle.
I’m working with Grupo Balsas — a nonprofit focused on economic development in rural Mexico — to calculate the ongoing costs of operating this freezer facility. Ana, the co-founder of Grupo Balsas, is leading the meeting. She explains the floor plans to the engineer and pantomimes how to filet a fish, a new skill the co-op members will have to learn for this business to work.
The Tierra Caliente lives up to its name — the temperature in the warehouse has to be over 100 degrees. But in recent years, academics have given the land another nickname: the “abysm of the globe.” The region is deeply impoverished and culturally isolated. Its agriculture economy has collapsed over the past two decades and it is now known as little more than a hotbed for illegal marijuana production, methamphetamine trade, drug trafficking, and high levels of emigration. And although it’s just 4 hours from the colonial city of Morelia, most urban-dwelling Mexicans avoid passing through at all costs.
It wasn’t always this way. At one point, the fields and forests of the Tierra Caliente were flowing with corn, beans, limes, mangos, and avocados. But the climate was fierce and the trading ports were far, and the farmers were dependent on government subsidies. In the late 1980s, the Mexican government began adopting neoliberal politics (or extreme hands-off government policies), which cut credit to farmers and funding for infrastructural projects. Road development became a ghost of the past, and farmers could no longer transport their products to other cities.
Throughout the nineties, the older fishermen watched as the precarious economy of the Tierra Caliente continued to disintegrate. Up until this point, the region had been heavily dependent on corn production for consumption and trade. Before becoming fishermen, many of the members of the co-op worked in the fields, where they would harvest a rich variety of red, blue, and yellow “maize” and sell to markets across the country. But in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed, removing tariffs on American corn imports. Major Mexican retailers canceled their contracts with local producers to buy it from states like Iowa and Illinois, where subsided producers were offering it for less than half the price.
As the state and the economy dismantled, some farmers began planting opium and marijuana in order to sustain themselves. Others just migrated elsewhere. Most of the remaining farmers live in poverty, lacking the capital to even purchase seeds or rudimentary farming and fishing equipment.
The engineers report that we have to install new internal lining of the warehouse, an additional unanticipated cost of this project. Mario interjects, suggesting we nix the freezer project and use the money to buy new fishing nets for the co-op members. The rest of the members are slinking away; we’ve lost momentum and it’s becoming more and more difficult to envision a future where the co-op will be profitable and the fishermen won’t have to hand off their catches to the loan shark on the shore.
“How much is the gasoline? How often do you fill your truck?” I ask a few of the cooperative members after the meeting, trying to calculate their operating expenses. “Maybe write it down next time you go to the gas station?” They give me a blank stare; I later learn they don’t know how to write.
“There is always resistance when you try to create change,” Ana tells me on the drive back when I ask about Mario’s hesitance to support the freezer plant. But she also mentions that Mario has access to the only other means of reliable income in this region; his children live in the United States and send him monthly remittances. We curve through the mountainous roads of the Tierra Caliente, driving past lime fields and mango trees, through ghost-town pueblos where all of the inhabitants have fled for the United States. Ripe mangos drop on the ground and rot; no one is there to pick them up. The state of Michoacán was responsible for 9.1% of all Mexican emigrants in 2014. The rural regions of Michoacán — alongside Jalisco and Guanajuato — have the highest annual migration rates to the United States in the country.
“Why would you leave the United States?” a woman from Arrinque, a tiny puebla in Michoacán, said to me, one morning when I landed on her front stoop after taking the wrong bus on the way home from the grocery store. She called me a cab and told me about her daughter who lives in Oregon with the grandchildren she has never met. “I am here to work,” I responded, while sitting on the curb with plastic bags still dangling around my wrists. She laughed. “But there is no work in Mexico.”
The most frightening part of the American immigration debate is that we have stopped discussing the root causes of migration all together. The irony emerged dramatically at the February 2016 Iowa caucus as candidates focused on border security, physical barriers, and pathways to American citizenship. No one mentioned what we really should be discussing in this state: how Iowa’s farm subsidies have crushed the Mexican agricultural economy.
If you take away one thing from this story, let it be this: US taxpayers pay $20 billion per year to Midwestern farms, mostly in Iowa and Illinois, to subsidize their costs of agriculture production. These payments are not going to the Mom and Pop operations at the organic farmer markets, but to billionaire landowner who produce commodity crops, like corn and soybeans, which are often exported to other countries. Recipients have included Alice, Jim and Rob Walton (children of the founder of Wal-Mart, Penny Pritzker (Commerce Secretary & Billionaire), and Bruce Springsteen. Things got really ugly when the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in 1994 to permit unfettered trade between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. There was no consideration as to how Mexican farmers could possibly compete with U.S. pricing when American farm owners received billions of dollars annually in government support. Subsequently, when Mexican retailers were free to purchase corn from whomever they wanted, they turned to American companies, who were essentially selling it for less than their production costs.
I’ve described the economic deterioration of the Tierra Caliente, but this is just a microcosm of many rural regions of the country. Our logic is twisted and dizzying: we’re paying billions of tax dollars in agricultural subsidies to allow farmers to produce cheap corn and export it south of the border, and then we’re discussing how we can spend billions more to keep these out-of-work farmers out of our country.
When politicians rely on national ideology and “American dream” sentimentality to avoid confronting agricultural lobbyists, they do a very dangerous thing. These ideas seep south of the border and into the minds of rural Mexican farmers and fishermen. The collective consciousness begins to frame America as the place for opportunity and the rural regions of Mexico as disposable wastelands. In turn, more and more Marios will begin to emerge; rural Mexican farmers who have given up on developing their own regions and encourage their children to leave home and migrate north. By the time we finally realize that physical barriers are not a sufficient response to economic decline, it may be too late.
NAFTA has been a massive setback but that does not mean that agricultural production and trade is not a means of accomplishing economic development. But we need to level the playing field. We need to create trade patterns that create jobs in these rural regions. We need to provide small-scale farmers and fishermen with markets, and we need to make sure they have the equipment to produce. Capitalism must be coupled with human empathy in order to compensate for the destruction that has been caused in this region.
The cost of investing in rural regions of Mexico would be cheaper than any sort of fencing or border security. We pay our Midwestern farmers $20 billion per year in farm subsidies. Why couldn’t we incorporate development funds in rural regions in Mexico into our budget for immigration? This isn’t the only answer. But when we frame our debate around the root issues, instead of how we can keep immigrants out, we’ll come up with more productive solutions. When we begin to discuss taboo subjects like farm subsidies, we introduce hope that these rural regions could eventually recover. We can start to frame immigrants as if they are humans with families and roots and history, rather than jailbirds out to steal our American dream. We may decide that it is better to spend $8,000 on a fishing freezer, than billions of dollars on a fence.
