In my first draft, I made the mistake of being far too formal. I completely ignored my position as an advocate and approached the topic from the standpoint of a researcher. My self-evaluation of the first draft was quite an eye-opener, as it opened my perspective to new approaches I could take to patch up my mistakes in my next draft. It also gave me a few ideas on how to incorporate multimodality and improve on the pacing of my essay.

Ukwa Akkum

Professor Ramirez

Writing 39C

July 26, 2018

Solutions to Mexico-U.S. immigration

         As of 2016, Mexico’s government has estimated 43% of its population to be living below the national poverty line.[1]Although the nation has high hopes in moving forward, its slow progress in economic improvement has heavily stalled these ambitions. Its citizens have long been aware of the slowly improving conditions, and those with resources have chosen to move to the United States where a strong economy has already been established and job opportunities have proved themselves to be prosperous. Unfortunately, this practice of moving to the United States for more opportunities cannot afford to continue because of overpopulation and increased expenses on the hands of other American citizens to support the wellbeing of legal immigrants as well as deportation programs for illegal immigrants.

History of Mexican Immigration

            Mexico’s annual per-capita growth has remained relatively unchanged as it averages out at 2.5% per year, a number much worse than its developing nation counterparts.[2]The nation has made many attempts to improve its growth, the most promising of such being their entrance into a free trade agreement with a world power expecting a major increase in foreign investment. Sadly, analysis has shown that the country may not have been ready for such a large responsibility at its time of signing.

The effects of NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement, an agreement signed between the United States, Mexico, and Canada to remove trade tariffs between themselves, was originally signed by Mexico with the intentions of stabilizing the national economy, promoting economic development through the encouragement of more foreign direct investment, and creating more jobs. Driven by the country’s ongoing debt crisis as the government saw itself unable to pay off foreign debts of the time, Mexico decided to sign. Under this agreement, Mexico’s working class was expected to see be the bearer of prosperity as economic conditions improved and more jobs became available, yet quite the opposite occurred.

            While the agreement did benefit Mexico’s economy in some ways, it was very specific in who it chose to benefit. The working class was not among those who reaped awards, being hit the hardest through widespread job loss. As protective tariffs formed around U.S. subsidized crops and erased space for competition, millions of farmers were forced out of their farms and thousands of businesses were displaced. Although NAFTA was not fully responsible for the events that followed, the disappearance of the nation’s dominant sector was a large contributor towards the nation’s subsequent decline in wages, increased unemployment rates, and stagnant change in annual per-capita growth.[3]As conditions continued to worsen, many workers gave up hope in their home country and felt their next closest chance for better opportunity was migration to the U.S.[4]

Identifying push and pull factors

            The United States has not been welcoming towards migrants in search of opportunity, responding through an increase in funding border security and illegal immigrant targeting programs. Despite its increase, fear tactics have proved to be insufficient in keeping these immigrants away as they continue to attempt residency even after capture. Many other opinions follow similar beliefs in stopping immigration as they focus on increasing immigration enforcement around the nation. Some others provide useful deterrence methods, one in particular being Marion Smith, a researcher and writer for the Heritage Foundation. In his article “Solutions for America: Developing a Strong Border and Immigration Policy,” he states enhancing workplace enforcement to ensure all workers are legal citizens, increasing temporary worker programs, and opening new pathways to citizenship as some worthwhile solutions to implement. Although each deterrence method listed is effective in its own way, many people have failed to look at the causes of illegal immigration and targeted its effects instead. From past analysis, many Mexican immigrants have listed low job availability and poor living conditions among their top reasons for leaving their home country.

In order to influence these workers to return to their home countries and discourage future migrants from making the decision to migrate, the factors that pull them to the U.S. need to be decreased while the factors that keep them in their home country need to be increased. In doing so, these migrants will weigh the pros and cons of leaving their home countries and most will conclude that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages they may face. Seeing as the factors that attract these migrants to the U.S. are mostly due to the country’s strong economic status, improving Mexico’s economy should also bring similar benefits and allow the country to improve itself gradually. Although Mexico currently struggles to improve gradually, conditions for the working class still suffer as they face underemployment, wages low enough to violate their Constitution, poor infrastructure, and a persistent housing crisis which has forced many to either build their own homes or take up small spaces.

There exist signs that Mexicans who have established themselves in the U.S. would still be willing to move back to their home country so long as improvement is seen. The biggest sign lies in a 2015 survey that shows lawful Mexican immigrants among the least likely group to become U.S. citizens despite legal citizenship among these immigrants reaching its highest levels in two decades, as many state insufficient English proficiency, lack of time or motivation, and cost of application as factors keeping them hesitant from doing so.[5]In fact, compared to migration levels in the late twentieth century, there has already been a steep decline in Mexico-U.S. migration since the mid-2000s linked to the decline in the U.S. economy.[6]Analyzing these statistics, it is implied that decreasing the factors that pull these migrants to the U.S. and fixing the factors that push them out of their home country are the most effective ways of ‘naturally’ decreasing illegal immigration levels. If the U.S. feels that this problem is a top priority, they should treat it as such and be devoted to helping solve the problem in a better manner.

A new solution: foreign aid

            Foreign aid is a highly controversial topic among scholars, who have made three dominant opinions: foreign aid has been harmful towards poor countries, its amounts should be drastically increased to be more effective, and it should be controlled and specific to reach peak effectiveness. Its effectiveness is heavily debated, with one researcher’s analysis over nearly 100 studies concluding that the link between foreign aid and growth was positive, yet the margin was small and almost insignificant. This study specifically found no relation between increased aid and faster growth, which has been found to be true among countries. Other scholars have stated these claims of no relation to be exaggerated, with evidence from the poorest nations in Africa showing that assistance helped speed up GDP growth by nearly 1% each year.[7]Sebastian Edwards, a writer for the World Economic Forum, claims this number to be ‘nontrivial’ as these countries already have a low GDP rate to start from, yet if this number were applied to another country its effect would be a much higher increase in economic condition. The writer does make the great point of analyzing why some foreign aid projects are successful and others are disasters rely on greatly analyzing the context of the country.

             Steve Radelet, a writer for the Brookings Press, has a different opinion to offer on the effectiveness of foreign aid. In his article “Once more into the breach: Does foreign aid work?” he targets the critics of foreign aid, stating that claims of the assistance being ineffective are ‘utterly false’. He ensures to include the possibility of complete failure in certain projects before pointing out a few successful projects including health programs, such as the AIDS Relief program which provided HIV care and treatment to patients in need and references an academic writeup that found foreign aid equivalent to 10 percent of the GDP enough to raise per capita growth rates by an average of one percent. Although these all seem like great examples of improvement, it seems as if foreign aid is most effective when targeting health issues and works slowest when improving economic conditions as should be expected.

            These foreign aid findings lead me to believe that directly investing in a country to improve economic aid is great for long term strategies but will not work fast enough to be a direct solution to the U.S.’s illegal immigration. It can still be used, but direct financial investment is proving to be too slow for a direct solution and needs to be used as a supplement with something else. Seeing as Mexico’s government struggles with making jobs available and these residents have problems with quality of life, it appears as though directly increasing jobs while improving infrastructure will be a better solution. In order to fund such a savvy solution, the government should reduce its funding in immigration security-related programs and spend these funds coming up with incentives for U.S.-based companies with transnational labor factories to move their production over to Mexico and produce more jobs. With other money left over, the U.S. should assist Mexico in improving their infrastructure and, seeing as Mexico has already started the process, the U.S. will not need to invest much more money into Mexico to help it doing so. In the process, construction jobs may be created and by the time the new infrastructure is complete there should be enough new jobs created to provide these unemployed constructionists with a new opportunity for work in their country.

To Be Continued…

[1]Associated Press. “Mexico Says Poverty down to about 44 Percent of Population.” Fox News,

FOX News Network, 30 Aug. 2017, www.foxnews.com/world/2017/08/30/mexico-says-poverty-down-to-about-44-percent-population.html.

[2]Martin, Eric, and Nacha Cattan. “Has NAFTA Been Good for Mexican Economy?” Farm Futures, Informa PLC, 29 Nov. 2017, www.farmfutures.com/trade/has-nafta-been-good-mexican-economy.

[3]Carlsen, Laura. “The New York Times Company.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Nov. 2013, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain.

[4]Scott, Robert E., and David Ratner. “NAFTA’S CAUTIONARY TALE.” EPI Issue Brief, 20 July 2005.

[5]Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana. “Mexican Lawful Immigrants Among the Least Likely to Become U.S. Citizens.” Pew Research Center's Hispanic Trends Project, Pew Research Center, 29 June 2017, www.pewhispanic.org/2017/06/29/mexican-lawful-immigrants-among-least-likely-to-become-u-s-citizens/.

[6]Fix M, Papademetriou DG, Batalova J, Terrazas A, Lin SY, Mittelstadt M. Migration and the global recession. Migration Policy Institute; Washington, DC: 2009. [Ref list]

[7]Collier, P. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, Oxford: Oxford University Press.