The Saturday edition of Mexico City's Reforma newspaper published a bitter description of what its author sees as a long chain of exploitation suffered by Central American migrants on their journey to the United States.
It makes for interesting reading, not just for those who share its Marxist indignation at the inexorable power of capitalism, but also for those of a more centrist disposition who think large-scale unskilled immigration is one of the factors nudging the United States toward Latin American levels of economic inequality. Both groups are concerned about the politically enabled appetites of many businesses for cheap labor.
Written by columnist Jose Luis Lezema, the essay is rooted in outrage at the suffering of Central American migrants. It is entitled "The Beast" — the colloquial name of the train that carries hundreds of migrants northward. They are unauthorized travelers who scramble up the train's sides and ride its roof for hundreds of miles. Rapes, robberies, and severed legs are commonplace.
Lezema calls the train part of "the criminal machinery … that benefits from profits generated by the migrants." Also part of that machinery, he writes, are others who exploit them along the way: criminal bands, smugglers, police, and public officials.
Lezema also implicates the "Gang of Eight" U.S. senators who want an immigration reform bill that would provide a legal path to the United States for many of those who now suffer the inhumanity of the train. He writes:
Maybe those senators know little of this Beast that deposits thousands of migrants, exhausted and despoiled, on their border with Mexico. Maybe they don't know that it is just an instrument, an appendage of that other great Beast that is the American economy, which devours, which feeds itself on the undervalued work and the hopes of millions of migrants.
He adds: "None of these actors, key in American politics and the American economy, really understand with any certainty the vicissitudes of the thousands of men who every day begin the uncertain and extremely dangerous journey from Mexico's southern border. They are human beings situated at the other extreme of their socio-political game and of geography, in a territory brutally attached to them and their decisions."
Lezema is not persuaded by the claim of John McCain and others that their proposal would provide an alternative to the current chaos. He finds their motivation in political expediency, in their service of "economic allies [who] just want the cheap labor of the migrants in times of labor shortage and economic boom."
Even a compassionate priest who provides aid to the suffering migrants is assigned a role in Lezema's transnational drama of runaway capitalism. He writes that the priest unintentionally "complements the work of the senators … [and] provides an essential part of the machinery that is necessary so that the American economy does not suffer from a shortage of the cheap labor vital for their positioning in the atrocious competition for international markets."
Lezema concludes on a note of dark irony about McCain's observation in January about the reason for the new-found enthusiasm of some Republicans for his brand of immigration reform.
Writes Lezema: "The Mexican and Central American migrants should be grateful to Senator McCain for his sincerity and the clarity of his language. Asked about his sudden interest — and that of his party — in undocumented migrants, he responded without hesitation: 'The elections, the elections.'"
