1NC Frontline: Solvency 209
1) Alternate Causality: Economic cycles determine the public’s feelings toward immigrants, and the aff’s performance can’t change that.
JOHNSON, 98
[Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of California at
Davis School of Law; “AN ESSAY ON IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, AND U.S./MEXICO RELATIONS:
THE TALE OF TWO TREATIES;" 5 Sw. J. L. & Trade Am. 121]
Economic and social forces shape the rate of legal and illegal immigration to the United States and the legal and social status of migrants in the country. Business gains in the United States result from a low wage labor force provided by migration from Mexico. The public in the United States, however, resists formalizing the immigration status of Mexican immigrants, who are viewed as racially and culturally different and a threat to their economic well-being. The uncertain legal status of undocumented immigrants renders them all the more susceptible to exploitation in the workplace. It is difficult to see how law, whether through bilateral agreement or otherwise, could substantially change this complex social dynamic.
2) Turn: Legal change won’t protect new immigrants from racism, and the problem will only get worse when new people come to the U.S.
JOHNSON, 98
[Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of California at
Davis School of Law; “AN ESSAY ON IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, AND U.S./MEXICO RELATIONS:
THE TALE OF TWO TREATIES;" 5 Sw. J. L. & Trade Am. 121]
To worsen the prognosis for change through a migration agreement between the United States and Mexico, U.S. laws designed to protect minority citizens from discrimination and workplace exploitation have been far from effective. The U.S. government long has experienced difficulties enforcing laws protecting racial minorities, whether they be U.S. or foreign citizens. For example, as George Martfnez has documented, courts generally have failed to protect the civil rights of Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants. As commentators have observed, the undocumented, particularly vulnerable due to their uncertain immigration status, need increased protections to prevent exploitation. Whether the law could ever effectively prevent such exploitation is open to debate.
1NC Frontline: Solvency 210
3) Narratives do not break down racism. Individuals all experience suffering differently, and personal stories become distorted once they enter politics.
KLEINMAN AND KLEINMAN, 96
[Dr. Arthur, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University; Joan, Professor of Mathematics and Coordinator of Activating Learning in the Classroom at Middlesex Community College. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus, v. 125, n.1]
Suffering is one of the existential grounds of human experi ence; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience in human conditions. It is also a master subject of our mediatized times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political conflict, forced migration, famine, substance abuse, the HIV pandemic, chronic illnesses of dozens of kinds, crime, domestic abuse, and the deep privations of destitution are everywhere. Video cameras take us into the intimate details of pain and misfortune. Images of suffering are appropriated to appeal emotionally and morally both to global audiences and to local populations. Indeed, those images have become an important part of the media. As "infotainment" on the nightly news, images of victims are commercialized; they are taken up into processes of global marketing and business competition. The existential appeal of human experiences, their potential to mobilize popular sentiment and collective action, and even their capability to witness or offer testimony are now available for gaining market share. Suffering, "though at a distance," as the French sociologist Luc Boltanski tellingly expresses it, is routinely appropriated in American popular culture, which is a leading edge of global popular culture. This globalization of suffering is one of the more troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era: troubling because experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation of suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted. It is important to avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or sentimentalizing suffering. There is no single way to suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering. There are communities in which suffering is devalued and others in which it is endowed with the utmost significance. The meanings and modes of the experience of suffering have been shown by historians and anthropologists alike to be greatly diverse. Individuals do not suffer in the same way, any more than they live, talk about what is at stake, or respond to serious problems in the same ways. Pain is perceived and expressed differently, even in the same community. Extreme forms of suffering - survival from the Nazi death camps or the Cambodian catastrophe - are not the same as the "ordinary" experiences of poverty and illness.
1NC Frontline: Solvency 211
4) Turn: Exploitation.
A) “Opening the border” would not be enforceable; the U.S. has cheated on other treaties with Mexico and this would be no different.
JOHNSON, 98
[Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of California at
Davis School of Law; “AN ESSAY ON IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, AND U.S./MEXICO RELATIONS:
THE TALE OF TWO TREATIES;" 5 Sw. J. L. & Trade Am. 121]
Suppose, however, that the political climate changed dramatically in a way that "open borders" advocates might endorse. Assume that the United States agreed to permit labor migration between the two nations while (to be fair) prohibiting the exploitation of Mexican labor. Would the terms of such an agreement be enforceable? Unfortunately, significant evidence suggests that they would not be, at least under present political, economic, and social conditions. Experience with the lax enforcement of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and United States anti-discrimination laws generally, suggest that undue confidence in the effectiveness of such a compact would not be justified.
B) Cultural and economic forces would create a cycle of poverty for new immigrants after the border was opened, making life worse for everyone involved.
JOHNSON, 98
[Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of California at
Davis School of Law; “AN ESSAY ON IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, AND U.S./MEXICO RELATIONS:
THE TALE OF TWO TREATIES;" 5 Sw. J. L. & Trade Am. 121]
Assume that the United States and Mexico filled in the immigration gap left by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and NAFTA and agreed to permit free migration of labor between the two nations. Assume also that part of the hypothetical accord required that the parties enforce the same laws - minimum wage, safe working conditions, non-discrimination - applied to the member countries' own citizens. Would free migration positively affect the work-lives of Mexican immigrants in the United States? There is reason to believe that the best-made agreement would not meaningfully change the status quo. Indeed, one might speculate that it would worsen matters for Mexican citizens working in the United States. An open border presumably would increase migration by Mexican workers into the United States, though the magnitude of any immigrant flow is difficult to predict. Due to family ties and social networks developed over generations, two powerful factors in the current Mexican migration to the United States, one would expect continued job segregation as family and social networks steered immigrants to certain jobs. One also would expect many of the migrants to be unskilled. By increasing the supply of unskilled labor in certain jobs, increased migration would place downward pressure on wages. This is precisely what occurred in agriculture with the temporary Mexican labor programs that existed in the United States from World War II through the 1960s. Such a result would be consistent with the fact that both the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and NAFTA adversely affected agricultural labor, with its large Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American component, in the United States.
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