Transient Servitude: .. Exploiting Mexican and Central American Workers

Transient Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program for Exploiting Mexican and Central American Workers

by Richard D. Vogel

... The institutionalization of Mexican workers as a reserve labor pool for U.S. capitalism has produced waves of migration to the North, and, periodically, led to mass, and in some instances, forced, deportations ... Especially relevant to the unfolding U.S. labor strategy is the fact that the maquiladora program resulted in substantial resettlement of the working-age Mexican population along the U.S.-Mexico border that was supplemented in the 1990s by many of the over one million Mexican farmers dislocated by NAFTA ... U.S. financial and political intervention in the national life of Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s, often carried out through the WTO, has pauperized the Mexican working class ... Linking the legal status of the worker to a binding contract shifts virtually all the power to the side of the employer or contractor and inevitably leads to abuse—a fact that the twenty-two year history of the Bracero Agreement and all other guest worker programs demonstrate unequivocally ... I-35, which already carries a trickle of farm workers from the Mexican states of Tlaxcala, Guanajuanto, Mexico, and Hildago to the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec under an existing bilateral guest worker agreement, is slated to become the main conduit of the U.S. guest worker program, transporting an unending stream of transient labor between the heart of Mexico and the heartland of America ...

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107vogel.htm

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