Imperial Water

Water was falling steadily on September 30th, water carried by the prevailing winds all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. It's falling now, too. September's rain reminded me of the tortured history of water between this country and Mexico.

Here, in the Northeast, we usually have an abundance of water, although the "monsoon" we've had broke a six-week drought. But the whole western third of the US has always been deficient in water. The West used to be tagged, on old maps, as 'The Great Western Desert.' This included large parts of California.

Most of the West was also a possession of Mexico, until the Mexican war of 1846-48. The US annexed Texas before the war; after, it took over all the Rocky Mountain and Pacific territories (California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada) when it won the war, which the US fought for blatant territorial aggrandizement. Americans called it "manifest destiny."

Some of the prized possessions of those territories are the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers. The Colorado flows from Wyoming into Mexico, all the way to Mexico's Gulf of California, or it did. Now, there are times when its flow is negligible by the time it gets to Mexico. It's the main source of water for California's Imperial Valley, one of the richest irrigated agricultural regions in the world.

There was a Mexican-American Water Treaty negotiated in 1944. It allocates more water to the US, from the Colorado and the Rio Grande, so Mexico does not receive the water enjoyed by American farmers and city dwellers in places like LA, the Imperial Valley (aptly named), and Arizona. I've seen lush fields of hay (!) in Arizona's deserts, for example.

So, first, the US took a large part of Mexico, and then it took a good deal of its water. That water is used to grow crops Mexico cannot. Then, to add insult to injury, the US negotiated NAFTA so that US subsidized corn could flood Mexico (where corn/maize first appeared more than two thousand years ago). Mexican peons couldn't compete; subsidized imports drove them from their smallholdings.

American corporations not only wanted to export surplus corn, but to establish maquiladoras over the border. So, the flood of cheap workers created by destroying Mexico's small farms was serendipitous.

However, China's lower labor costs made the maquiladoras less competitive. So, Mexico has a large unemployed, rootless labor force. Is it surprising that Mexicans stream across the Rio Grande, or the Arizona desert? Or that drug trafficking has become one of Mexico's principal industries?

Border States have become "hard-assed" about illegal immigration, but imperial bullying brings consequences. The flood of Chicanos into the US is one.

Lack of water is one of its principal causes.

Arizona, Global Warming and 2 Billion Headed North

What does immigration have to do with US foreign policy?

Why do illegal immigrants have a moral right to work in this country?

The Arizona law is outrageous, but not entirely so. Its justification is ineffective enforcement of immigration laws by the Feds, which in turn is due to the insupportable nature of the laws themselves.

Immigration, especially of the illegal variety, is caused by US imperial policies. With NAFTA, CAFTA and "anti-Communist," "anti-terrorist" or drug war policies, the US is massively involved in destroying jobs in other countries.

When the US insists that large US agribusiness can export subsidized corn to Mexico, for example, it causes massive displacement of campesinos from their farms. This displacement was intended to create cheap labor for the maquiladoras near the border, but not enough jobs were created. The excess jobless have nowhere to go but to el Norte.

When the US helped local elites stave off or drive out democratic governments in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and most recently, Honduras, something very similar occurred: the repressed and displaced have nowhere to go but el Norte.

When the US wages wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen, it creates huge disruption--and large numbers of refugees. The only reason we don't see more of them is distance.

When the US and other "advanced" nations do too little and too late to address climate change, disproportionately caused by us, but disproportionally affecting less developed nations, we will see even more massive dislocation of populations. If the monsoon rains fail because of climate change (there is good reason to expect this will happen) then large parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, south China and Africa will be unable to support their huge populations.

Where will these "climate refugees" go? Two billion people or more could be headed north, to Europe, Canada, Russia and the US. And the reason would be the failure of the above "developed" nations to come up with a climate change treaty that would alleviate or reverse climate change: climate change they largely caused with two centuries of industrial development!

If climate change was largely caused by us (and Europe), and if its worst effects are felt in places like India and Bolivia, doesn't that make us morally responsible?

This is why the poor, developing nations demand "reparations:" to alleviate the effects of runaway climate change, and to respond to it, despite their own poverty--exacerbated by developed nation policies (led by the US and its corporate elites).

We should stop fooling ourselves: our imperial meddling creates illegal immigration. Two billion more could surge north, because of our inability to deal adequately with climate change. It would be like the Age of Migrations, which brought down the Roman Empire.

The corporations, which profit so handsomely from our imperial policies, should be taxed to fund developing nations' reparations.