US Farm Subsidies and Immigration

This week’s New York Times Magazine includes an article about US farm subsidies written by Michael Pollan — a professor at UC Berkeley and the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Professor Pollan points out not only the obvious linkages between US farm subsidies and American obesity, but also the relationship between those farm subsidies and immigration.  He writes:

To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system doesnot begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on globalpoverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for Americanfarmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it coststo grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexicoand the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers inthose places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to thecities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north fromMexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American cornin the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexicangovernment estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and otheragricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently,the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left thatcountry reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economyto ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well asits farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures drivingimmigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy isdoing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

The full article is here.   With the signing of Nafta, we proclaimed “free trade” with Mexico, but it was “free” only in rhetoric.  Barriers to immigration and the persistence of farm subsidies have ensured that the people who bear the heaviest costs are Mexican workers — and, relatedly, low wage American workers who wind up competing with Mexican workers bereft of wage and workplace protections in the US labor market.

Of course, it is much easier to focus anti-immigration measures on the politically powerless than to target powerful agribusiness.

-jmc