Migrants: Globalization's Junk Mail?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/16/2007 04:47:00 AM
I saw this opinion piece intriguingly titled "Migrants: Globalization's Junk Mail?" in the "News on Globalization" feature on the blog's sidebar. Read it and see what you think:

Laura Carlsen
Americas Program
International Relations Center (I.R.C.)
May 14, 2007

The titles that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attaches to its operations reveal a great deal about the logic behind current American immigration policy.

Among the most suggestively titled is the ongoing Operation "Return to Sender," one of the largest such operations in American history. The program, supposedly designed to target "fugitive aliens," has resulted in the indiscriminate round up of over 13,000 undocumented migrants in cities throughout the United States.

The cynical name given to this even more cynical operation implies a sender, a receiver—and an object. The object, or rather objects, is migrant workers and their families.

Operation Return to Sender is an instrumentalist policy that ignores the humanity of migrant workers. It refuses to recognize that migrants have hopes and dreams, that they have a legitimate need to eat and think and act. It denies family ties and affective relationships. It also ignores the central role that undocumented workers play in the American economy and the factors that brought them to the country in the first place.

In short, Operation Return to Sender acts on the premise that the millions of undocumented workers in the United States today are little more than globalization's junk mail.

A large proportion of the detentions in Operation Return to Sender have been Mexicans, which is logical given that most undocumented migrants are Mexican. According to immigration expert Raúl Delgado Wise of the University of Zacatecas, Mexico is now the world champion in exporting its own people, with 11 million Mexicans currently residing in the United States. The migratory drain on Mexico's population shows up in demographic statistics, where 800 townships now register negative growth...