What's missing from the "comprehensive" immigration reform debate?

While the race is on to push past some version of a so-called comprehensive immigration reform package before Congress members take a spring "work" break, what remains absent from the sometimes impassioned debate on Capitol Hill is any notion of beefing up the U.S.'s paltry contribution to regional economic development. There's 700 miles of new fencing under consideration and a renewed effort to properly paperwork the lives of the estimated 12 million folks who exist without legal documentation in the U.S., but for all the talk of tougher policing of businesses that hire undocumented migrants or new ways to discourage newcomers from climbing over ever taller barriers into the U.S., there has been little attention to strategies aimed at making it rational for people to simply stay where they are.

Through international trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has inextricably bound its future with the futures of Mexico and Central America. While we have liberated capital flows through such treaties, we have not created parallel structures to liberate labor, thus, even as NAFTA creates profound human dislocations in subsistentence agricultural communities in Southern Mexico, there is no legal construct that allows these dislocated folks to seek new livelihoods in places that offer more economic potential. The temporary guest worker proposal is one idea meant to respond to that dilemma. A better idea might be a vast broadening of the foreign aid commitment the U.S. makes to its regional neighbors. Currently the U.S. coughs up a paltry $33 million a year in the form of aid to Mexico while directing billions each year to faraway lands like Israel and Egypt.

A more opportunity-rich home environment might mean fewer folks driven to what can only be a hazardous and frustrating sojurn into el norte. Currently it is Mexican people themselves, living in the U.S. legally or otherwise, who are bankrolling the largest informal foreign aid program in Mexico as they remit $20 billion earned each year in the U.S. to their home communities. Without that "aid" program, the number of migrants climbing border fences would surely be higher. If the U.S. sincerely wants to end its problem with undocumented workers crossing an imaginary line in the sand of our southwestern desert, it must join these people in their effort to stabilize and grow the Mexican economy and allow people to stay in the communities their families have inhabited since before Columbus got lost in the Atlantic.