Border surveillance neg cartels k

Link turn – NAFTA

The plan causes NAFTA backlash

(Peter, “Border Games,” p. 84)//BB

Each agency is concerned only about showing the success of its discrete mission, rather than with the viability of the policy as a whole. Each has its own way of measuring and justifying its performance: for example, the Customs Service highlights seizures and arrests at the border ports of entry; the DEA prioritizes the capture of major traffickers; the State Department stresses the level of cooperation with Mexico. Poor results tend to be blamed on mismanagement and insufficient resources. Improved results are assumed to come from more and better law enforcement and cross-border cooperation. The question-and-answer period that follows the prepared official testimonies can often be heated, but given the political and bureaucratic interests involved, there is rarely any challenge to the basic underlying supply-side logic of the drug control strategy.

Projecting an impression of cross-border commitment and progress in the antidrug campaign has ultimately proved to be more politically consequential for U.S. and Mexican leaders than whether or not the drug supply has actually been reduced. Regardless of its deterrent effect, the escalation of enforcement efforts has helped to fend off political attacks and kept the drug issue from derailing the broader process of economic integration. In other words, a policy that has largely failed in its stated goal has nevertheless helped to realize other key political objectives—most notably the creation and maintenance of NAFTA. The intensified antidrug campaign, however, has brought with it significant collateral damage: more corruption, more militarized law enforcement, more linkages between the drug trade and legitimate cross-border trade, and a generally more "nar-coticized" U.S.-Mexico relationship.

NAFTA is key to the economy

From the current U.S. government’s perspective, the U.S. economy has been a big ¶ winner under NAFTA. U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab says U.S. merchandise ¶ exports to Canadian and Mexico grew more rapidly – 157% – than U.S. exports to the rest of ¶ the world, which was 108%.¶ About US$2.4 billion worth of goods crosses the northern and southern borders ¶ each day. As a result, Canada and Mexico are the U.S.’s first and second largest export ¶ markets, although China is soon expected to be the U.S.'s largest trading partner. Initial ¶ worries about NAFTA, from the U.S. perspective, had little to do with trade with Canada. ¶ Instead, former presidential candidate Ross Perot, characterized then widespread concerns ¶ about America job losses to Mexico as “that giant sucking sound.¶ That does not appear to have happened.¶ Instead, Schwab says that U.S. economic growth during the past 14 years of NAFTA ¶ has been strong: U.S. employment rose 22% to 137.2 million in December 2006 from 112.2 ¶ million in December 1993. The average unemployment rate was 5.1% between 1994 and ¶ 2006, compared with 7.1% between 1981 and 1993.¶ U.S. manufacturing output rose by 63% between 1993 and 2006, nearly double the ¶ 37% seen between 1980 and 1993. Wages in the same sector increased 1.6% between ¶ 1993 and 2006 compared with 0.9% between 1980 and 1993.¶ Excluding housing, U.S. business investment has risen by 107% since 1993, ¶ compared with 45% between 1980 and 1993The U.S. Trade Representative also insists that NAFTA’s investment provisions such ¶ as Chapter 11 do not prevent the U.S. – or any NAFTA country – from adopting or ¶ maintaining non-discriminatory laws or regulations that protect the environment, worker ¶ rights, health and safety or other public interest. ¶ Schwab notes that to date the U.S. has not lost a challenge in cases decided under ¶ NAFTA, nor has it paid a penny in damages to resolve any investment dispute. Even if the ¶ U.S. were to lose a case, it could be directed to pay compensation but it could not be ¶ required to change the laws or regulations at issue.

Link turn – wages

Low-skilled immigration collapses wages

Ruark and Grahm 11 (Eric a. Ruark, Director of Research at Federation for American Immigration Reform and Professor at University of Maryland, and Matthew Graham, co-researcher for the Federation for American Immigration, “Immigration, Poverty and Low-Wage Earners the Harmful effect of Unskilled immigrants on American Workers” http://www.fairus.org/docs/poverty_rev.pdf May 2011 JM)

Today’s immigration system is dysfunctional because it is not responsive to the socioeconomic conditions of the country. Only a small share of legally admitted immigrants is sponsored by employers while the bulk are admitted because of family ties to earlier immigrants who may be living in poverty or near poverty. As a result, immigration contributes to an already-existing surplus of low-skilled workers, increasing job competition and driving down wages and conditions to the detriment of American workers. The presence of a large illegal workforce perpetuates a vicious cycle as degraded work conditions discourage Americans from seeking these jobs and make employers more dependent on an illegal foreign workforce. America’s massive low-skill labor force and illegal alien population allow employers to offer low pay and deplorable conditions. These harmful effects of the immigration system were recognized in the reports of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in the mid 1990s. The Commission’s immigration reform recommendations were welcomed by President Clinton and submitted to Congress, but have largely been ignored since then. Conditions for America’s poorest workers have continued to deteriorate because of both illegal and legal immigration. Reform of the immigration system to assure that it does not harm Americans and instead contributes to a stronger more equitable society is long overdue. The reforms that are needed include ending family-based chain migration and unskilled immigration, ending the job competition for America’s most vulnerable citizens by curtailing illegal immigration and unskilled legal immigration, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal workers. The U.S. has a responsibility to protect the economic interests of all of its citizens, yet the immigration system, which adds hundreds of thousands to the labor force each year, is bringing in workers faster than jobs are being created. Moreover, only a small portion of admissions are based on skills or educational criteria, creating an enormous glut of low-skilled workers who struggle to rise above poverty. In 1995, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform recommended curtailing family-based immigration and replacing the “failed and expensive regulatory system [for skill-based immigration] with one that is market-driven.” Along these lines, the Commission recommended that, “it is not in the national interest to admit unskilled workers” because “the U.S. economy is showing difficulty in absorbing disadvantaged workers.”1 Fifteen years later, U.S. politicians continue to ignore these recommendations, bowing to corporate demands for unskilled labor rather than taking a realistic look at immigration’s effect on poverty and the American worker.

Illegal immigrants deflate wages—statistical data

Ruark and Grahm 11 (Eric a. Ruark, Director of Research at Federation for American Immigration Reform and Professor at University of Maryland, and Matthew Graham, co-researcher for the Federation for American Immigration, “Immigration, Poverty and Low-Wage Earners the Harmful effect of Unskilled immigrants on American Workers” http://www.fairus.org/docs/poverty_rev.pdf May 2011 JM)

Illegal aliens are the least skilled subset of the immigrant population, and therefore the most likely to undercut the wages and working conditions of low-skilled natives. Among seventeen industry categories named by the Pew Research Center as having the highest proportions of illegal aliens, data from the Current Population Survey reveal that noncitizens earned lower wages than natives in all but one of them. 28 Data for noncitizens, which includes legal and illegal immigrants as well as temporary laborers, differ from data on illegal aliens because the latter tend to have lower wages and fewer skills. However, data on noncitizens are a much better fit for illegal aliens than using the foreign born population as a whole. In construction, noncitizens earned less than two-thirds of natives’ wage salaries, and in the two agricultural categories, they earned less than half. 29 Wage and salary differences demonstrate how illegal and unskilled immigrants place downward pressure on wages by providing an incentive for employers to choose them over natives. The opportunity to exploit workers is the reason big business clamors for more immigrant labor. Most wage-effect studies do not analyze illegal immigrants as a separate group because most demographic data is not differentiated on that basis. However, what evidence does exist indicates that they constitute a major drag on unskilled wages. In 2010, Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda of the Center for American Progress estimated that unskilled workers would on average make about $400 more per year if the illegal immigrant population were reduced by 4 million, or approximately one-third. 30 In Georgia, where the illegal immigrant share of the labor force went from about 4 percent to 7 percent from 2000 to 2007, a study by the Federal Reserve found that the illegal labor caused a 2.5 percent wage drop overall and an 11 percent drop in construction wages over the period. 31 This analysis used a confidential state employer database that helped identify Social Security mismatches, making it one of the most sophisticated estimates available. Other estimates focus on the entire immigrant population, whose education is comparable to natives at the high end but overwhelmingly unskilled at the other end of the distribution. The National Research Council’s landmark 1997 study estimated that high school dropouts earn 5 percent less per year due to immigration, which totaled $13 billion in wage losses at a time when the illegal alien population stood at less than half its present number. 32 Harvard University’s George Borjas concluded that immigration reduced wages for the poorest 10 percent of Americans by about 7.4 percent between 1980 and 2000 with even larger effects for workers with less than 20 years of experience. 33 Other economists who have found that immigration depresses low-skilled wages include the Cato Institute’s Daniel Griswold. 34 If legal and illegal immigration continue to add to the overabundance of unskilled workers, the consequences for poor natives will continue to grow.

Immigration has a significant average negative effect on wages

Borjas, Professor of Economics at Harvard, ’13 [George, described Business Week and the Wall Street Journal as “America’s leading immigration economist”, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, recipient of the 2011 IZA Prize in Labor Economics, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Immigration and the American Worker." Center for Immigration Studies. N.p., Apr. 2013. Web. 29 June 2015. .

Classifying workers by education level and age and comparing differences across groups over time shows that a 10 percent increase in the size of an education/age group due to the entry of immigrants (both legal and illegal) reduces the wage of native-born men in that group by 3.7 percent and the wage of all native-born workers by 2.5 percent. The results from the education/age comparisons align well with what is predicted by economic theory. Further support for the results from the education/age comparisons can be found in studies using the same method in other countries. A theory-based framework predicts that the immigrants who entered the country from 1990 to 2010 reduced the average annual earnings of American workers by $1,396 in the short run. Because immigration (legal and illegal) increased the supply of workers unevenly, the impact varies across skill groups, with high school dropouts being the most negatively affected group.

Illegal immigration specifically has a massive wage redistribution effect

Borjas, Professor of Economics at Harvard, ’13 [George, described Business Week and the Wall Street Journal as “America’s leading immigration economist”, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, recipient of the 2011 IZA Prize in Labor Economics, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Immigration and the American Worker." Center for Immigration Studies. N.p., Apr. 2013. Web. 29 June 2015. .]

The immigration surplus or benefit to natives created by illegal immigrants is estimated at around $9 billion a year or 0.06 percent of GDP — six one-hundredths of 1 percent. Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.

Immigrants outcompete Americans for jobs causing a drastic decline in wages

Borjas 13 (George, Economics Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, “Immigration and the American Worker,” April 2013, Center for Immigration Studies, http://cis.org/immigration-and-the-american-worker-review-academic-literature)//JL

Economists have long known that immigration redistributes income in the receiving society. Although immigration makes the aggregate economy larger, the actual net benefit accruing to natives is small, equal to an estimated two-tenths of 1 percent of GDP. There is little evidence indicating that immigration (legal and/or illegal) creates large net gains for native-born Americans. Even though the overall net impact on natives is small, this does not mean that the wage losses suffered by some natives or the income gains accruing to other natives are not substantial. Some groups of workers face a great deal of competition from immigrants. These workers are primarily, but by no means exclusively, at the bottom end of the skill distribution, doing low-wage jobs that require modest levels of education. Such workers make up a significant share of the nation’s working poor. The biggest winners from immigration are owners of businesses that employ a lot of immigrant labor and other users of immigrant labor. The other big winners are the immigrants themselves.

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