From Free Trade to Gassing Migrants

Photo Source Jonathan McIntosh | CC BY 2.0

Last weekend, US Border Patrol agents used tear gas against hundreds of migrants protesting on the Mexican side of the border with the United States. The men, women and children who were gassed were part of the six thousand asylum seekers who fled violence and poverty in Central America by forming a caravan that has now reached the US border. In a related event, the leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada will sign the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at the G20 summit in Argentina this weekend. The two events are related because the migrants who were gassed at the border are economic refugees who illustrate a major contradiction in these supposed free trade agreements. In order to facilitate ‘free trade’ these agreements violate one of the basic tenets of the ‘free market’: the free movement of labor. Given this reality, the USMCA could be more accurately named the United States Migrant Control Agreement (USMCA).

Like all neoliberal free trade agreements, the USMCA has little to do with free trade and everything to do with facilitating profit generation for multinational corporations. They allow corporations to freely move their capital, profits, raw materials and finished goods across borders, but the one commodity that does not have freedom of movement is labor. Workers are commodities under capitalism, as any economist will acknowledge. Consequently, restricting the free movement of one specific…

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