On December 8th, 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law. Under NAFTA, the United States, Canada, and Mexico became a single, giant, integrated market of almost 400 million people with $6.5 trillion worth of goods and services annually. On January 1, 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was put into effect, allowing the U.S., Canada and Mexico to start trading goods freely. This made Mexicans vulnerable to wealthy companies in the U.S looking to use them for cheap labor on government issued Visa Cards.
Simultaneous changes in the U.S also accelerated the migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows U.S agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts. Growers in North Carolina became large users of the program, especially through the North Carolina Growers Association. In 1993 Carroll Foods (bought by Smithfield in 1999), a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz’s Perote Valley. (Bacon 1) With big companies, like Smithfield, moving in to Mexico and taking over the economy, we see smaller farms and families thrown into extreme poverty. Mexican’s began to migrate to the U.S on work Visas to gain economic advantage to help their families back home in Mexico. The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration to the U.S.
In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless. (Bacon 2) The migration numbers pay tribute to the saying “the grass is greener on the other side,” many Mexican migrants come to the U.S. seeking employment for a better life than their previous situation. Many migrants come to the U.S. looking for work when specific crop seasons are happening, and return to Mexico and to their families in the colder months with their saved wages.
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The typical Mexican migrants are male, young/strong, agricultural workers with heavy economic motivation. There are higher concentrations of Mexican workers in the midwest and the southwest because of proximity and because of warm conditions for growing crops. Ethnic Replenishment is one interesting fact that scholars have pointed out recently; Migrants will replenish more quickly in California than say Kansas due to the ease of traveling up the coast verses into the heart of the U.S. (Jimenez) The United States has “beefed up” its border patrol and deportation laws since Obama came into office in 2008, setting the quota at 400,000 deportations per year. (Latin Americans PBS Episode 5) Even though the U.S. deports illegal immigrants back to their home country, they still come back because of the original cause, extreme poverty in Mexico and money to be made in the U.S.
In Cuba, things were a little different with Cuban politician and revolutionary Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz as Prime Minister from 1959 - 1976, and President from 1976 - 2008. After the Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba, the U.S and Cuba have not been on good terms politically or economically. Cuba’s population is split primarily between whites, mestizos and afro-cuban (blacks and mulattos), with the percentage of afro-cubans varying between 62% and 33% depending on the source. When Castro first came into power in Cuba, the afro-cuban population was disproportionately poor, lacking sufficient medical care, social services and educational opportunities. Castro believed that such overt racism was a direct conflict with his commitment to social justice and equality and passed policies to desegregate beaches, parks, work sites and social clubs. He outlawed all forms of legal and overt discrimination.
After the 1959 Revolution, made by Castro, 300,000 Cubans fled to Florida any way they could. Miami was considered a sort of mecca for refugees coming from Cuba, later leading to bilingual strikes and riots from whites feeling threatened by the infringing hispanic culture. Castro denounced keeping Cubans on the island, “if they can’t rise to the Revolution, we don’t want them, we don’t need them.” (Latino Americans PBS Episode 6) Many Cubans felt they were fleeing from Communist hands, seeking just economic opportunities and shelter. U.S President Carter encouraged U.S people to house these Cuban refugees, which were later discovered to be partially made up of released psych ward patients and prisoners that Castro shipped off. Although some of the Cuban migrants were prisoner and psych patients, many of them were light skinned families with higher levels of education.
While Mexico was in full blown business with the U.S. after NAFTA took effect, the U.S. embargo on Cuba was instituted (1961) to overthrow Fidel Castro and neutralize the threat his regime posed by blocking all trade, except in food and medicine. The embargo was aggressively tightened in the 1990s with the enactment of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. All trade with Cuba was blocked, including food and medicine. Some of the migrants still had family back home in Cuba that needed assistance, similar to the millions of Mexicans living in the U.S on temporary work visas. Remittances are transfers of money into Cuba from Cubans living and working abroad. Remittances primarily benefit white Cubans, because the majority of Cubans who emigrated after the Revolution were white or lighter-skinned mestizos. Statically speaking, 83.5 percent of Cuban immigrants living in the U.S identify themselves as whites. (coha.org) The complete removal of trade with Cuba slowed migrants coming to the U.S as well as U.S peoples visiting Cuba.
Without NAFTA taking effect, cheaper outsourced trade would not have temped U.S. farmers and businessmen to expand their companies in Mexico specifically. Mexican males would never have been forced to migrate to states like North Carolina, California and Kansas for laborious jobs to send money home to their impoverished families. Cuba was not as accepted into NAFTA due to the rise of communism by Fidel Castro and the threat the U.S felt. Many Cubans left Cuba after the Revolution as refugees, not as immigrants looking for better work like Mexicans. One thing is shared though, they are all coming to the U.S for a better life, a more free and just society. Are they getting it? Not really, but my guess is that things will smooth out as races start to blend more and more through the generations and it become harder and harder to classify someones race.
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