Massive migrations
The massive migrations from the poor countries towards the imperialist centres are a phenomenon generated by the capitalist system. As a matter of fact, it is a process unavoidable for its functioning.
On one pole of the process, poverty, destitution and starvation caused by the imperialist looting on the colonised countries. It is an inescapable process.
On one pole of the process poverty, destitution and starvation that the imperialist looting causes in the colonised countries make that for millions of Latin Americans the only alternative of survival is to emigrate to USA, try and get a job there and, with great sacrifice send some money to their family in their country of origin. In many cases, for these families the money they receive in this way is what makes the difference between getting food and starving. A similar phenomenon is taking place in Europe in relation to the Arabic, African and Asiatic countries. Or even in Latin America when the emigration ifs towards the slightly more developed countries, for example from Paraguay or Bolivia towards Brazil or Argentina or when the Nicaraguans go to El Salvador.
The need is so dire that people are willing to run all kinds of risks, including death when crossing the frontier or travelling in fragile boats across the Caribbean Sea. Millions of Mexicans, Centro-Americans, Ecuadorians and Brazilians have followed that path. At the same time, this need that crated room for the sinister human traffic, as the case of the so-called “coyotes” on the frontier between Mexico and the USA.
Great business
For the Latin American bourgeoisie this process represents a double benefit. On the one hand it is a useful escape valve to ease up the population pressure and the unemployment in their own countries. On the other hand, the money the émigrés send back home constitute an important source of income for the country. Mexico receives 20 000 million dollars and is second only to India in that concept. In other countries, such as El Salvador, Dominican Republic or Ecuador, this income represents increasingly important percentages of the nations gross product and are key issues for their economies.
On the other pole of the process, thanks to the immigration, the imperialist bourgeoisie can lay their hands on a numerous “industrial reserve army”: cheap labour to do the worst jobs in services, industries and farms, with workers that do not have many chances of getting organised to struggle. This permits the imperialist bourgeoisie to reduce the total mass of paid salaries and so improve the average rate of profit to boost up their own economy.
In Argentina recently several Bolivian workers died in a fire in a clandestine textile factory and that fact revealed the situation of thousands of illegal immigrants live in and work in conditions of virtual slavery with no labour security at all.
In USA immigrant workers ever have to serve a cannot fodder: the American army in Iraq has a high percentage of Hispanic soldiers, many of them under a contact which they signed in consideration of a promise of receiving a green card on return. It was not an isolated case that of one of the demonstrators carrying a poster saying “Bush, my Mexican son died in Iraq.”
