by Maceo Carrillo Martinet
Daily Lobo columnist
Ah, the real benefits of development.
In central India, civil rights leaders are refusing to eat until the Indian government listens to its people. Those who have not eaten in about a month are being supported only by the cries of thousands of university students, union leaders and others.
The construction of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in central India is one of the world's tallest dams, standing at 370 feet.
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Those who seek to benefit from this construction give inspirational speeches about the glorious future that development will bring.
You will not hear such glorious statements coming from the people whose homes, farmlands and memories have been flooded and drowned by the development of this dam.
Those who stand to profit from this development speak about a different world than those who are drowned by it. About 200,000 people have been displaced by the rising waters due to construction of the dam, which began in 1987. To this day, the displaced families have not received the minimum of five acres of arable land for farming and a plot for a house as promised by the government. Furthermore, the government is proposing to raise the dam about 30 feet higher, which, according to many estimates, would result in the displacement of about 220 nearby villages.
While a group of investors deposits money made from this dam project, those displaced families are forced to migrate to India's slums. In the cities' slums, meanwhile, people are being forced to evacuate from their makeshift homes because they are to be destroyed in a city-backed campaign to beautify the city.
Back in our hemisphere, things are little different.
In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement among Canada, the United States and Mexico was signed into law. The president of Mexico at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and President Clinton promoted NAFTA throughout the continent by declaring it would slow illegal immigration, fund much-needed environmental cleanup efforts along the border, and create a more prosperous Mexico.
Most politicians repeated these selling points at the time, while the pleas of environmental organizations about the ways in which NAFTA would speed up the environmental destruction of Mexico were not debated. NAFTA opened up Mexico to foreign investment in industries ranging from mining, hotel and timber industries. NAFTA also removed tariffs on imports while leaving intact American agricultural subsidies, which effectively made it more expensive for Mexican farmers to buy local corn than it was to buy corn produced in the United States.
Mexican farmers and local economies could not compete against the influx of cheaper products from America, and the farmers had to sell their land and look for work. Economists project an additional five to 15 million farmers will abandon the Mexican countryside by the year 2010 when all price-supporting mechanisms in the country are phased out.
These economic policies are the reason why millions of Mexicans have been uprooted from their lands and forced to become immigrants. These immigrants are the millions who are now working in the factories in Juarez, Mexico, picking the vegetables that fill supermarket shelves from New York to San Francisco, cleaning offices and homes, and building suburbs in southern California.
Immigrants from Mexico are not coming to America just because they are trying to take advantage of our great country, as many in this recent immigration debate would say. The real reason why millions are forced to leave the land in which they and their ancestors were born are the economic and environmental policies that the United States helped design.
The criminalization of millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, as embodied by the recent proposed immigration reform measures, is a perfect example of blaming the gun, as opposed to blaming the hand that pulled the trigger.
The same agreement that was supposed to stem the flow of immigration and help solve the environmental issues along the border has led to an increase of immigration and environmental destruction.
Most debates on immigration reform fail to address the most fundamental question we can ask ourselves - why are people forced to become immigrants? Maybe if we asked ourselves this question, we would be able to see the environmental and economic disasters that are the real cause of this problem.
The real face of development is not as pretty as we are led to believe.
