Roy Germano’s documentary answers some of the questions raised by an earlier documentary we discussed, Made in LA. While watching that, I kept wondering, what about the towns where immigrants come from? How does immigration affect the residents and local economies? What are some of the underlying causes of the poverty that force migration?
Germano addresses these questions in his beautifully shot documentary, showing us how NAFTA, governmental policies and corruption have impacted small farmers, turning small agriculture and livestock farming into an unprofitable venture, forcing some to sell their land. Rural development funds, when available go to friends and families of government officials, or simply disappear. Part of the problem, say the many subjects interviewed, is self-interest, rather than a sense of national fellowship and looking after one another.
The Other Side of Immigration shows the human side of immigration: families torn apart, towns depopulated, government officials who shrug about the rural polices. As the interviewees state time and again, they don’t want to live in the United states, but they want to help their families, and they only way to do that is to migrate and work Stateside.
Over $24 billion annually is sent to Mexico by migrant workers, money that not only supports the workers’ families, but also stimulates the economy of these small towns, providing revenue for merchants. But the price of that income is the break-up of families: Parents–primarily fathers–leave, for months, years, sometimes forever, and children once they leave ninth grade are eager to migrate themselves, seeing America as the land of opportunity.
But, as it’s pointed out, they never hear the stories of 12 to 14 hours work days, of living ten people to an apartment, of the fear of being discovered without documents, the dangers of border crossings. Instead, kids see the money that is sent home and how their family members return with trucks and nice clothes.
Is there a solution? Well, improving the economic situation in Mexico is start–the money spent building the anti-immigration wall could go towards building infrastructures. And visiting worker programs could allow workers to travel back and forth safely, removing the smugglers from the equation–and cutting down on drug trafficking as well.
Our country can’t function without immigrant workers, and as it’s pointed out, other countries also rely on immigrants who move from developing nations in the hope of making money to send home, hoping as well to eventually return. NAFTA has undermined Mexico’s economy, and as we are dependent on Mexico and they on us, it behooves both countries to develop a system that benefits workers and the host country–and to develop and implement policies that can help Mexico grow on its own so that the Mexican people can stand on their own.
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Hi Roy! Welcome to Firedoglake Movie Night. OMG, thank you for making The Other Side of Immigration! It made so many ideas accessible to me–-the stuff about NAFTA was so enlightening, and also from a cinematic point of view, I appreciated how beautifully shot it was–your ligting and the editing were superb!
Thanks Lisa. I’m so happy to be here!
And quick reminder: to comment on specific comment:–hit “reply” then type away. Also, refresh your screen every now and then (I do it like ever minute) to see the latest comments. Also, my tpying sorta suck, sorry…
Deportee – ”Plane Wreck at Lost Gatos”
Woody Guthrie – 1948
The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Chorus:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be ”deportees”
The farmers in Mexico have many of the sam ecomplaint as farmers in the US–it barely pays ot farm–one of the side effects of corporate farms and patented seeds…
Yes, I think it’s probably difficult to make it farming anywhere. But small holder Mexican farmers do not have many subsidies, so it is even more difficult there. And it’s been more difficult since the late-1980s when the Mexican government withdrew most existing subsidies in preparation for NAFTA.
NAFTA seems ot have pretty much screwed over both the US and Mexico…
Out of curiosity..the farmers who sell their land..who buys it?
I’d qualify that somewhat. NAFTA has pretty much screwed CERTAIN GROUPS in the U.S. and Mexico. Trade is critical to economic growth. If we all closed our economies, we’d be in bad shape. But anytime there is trade, there are winners and losers. The winners are usually consumers, who don’t know that they’re gaining from access to more goods and lower prices. And a lot of businesses win too when they are given access to new markets to sell their products. But the losers are those who can’t survive foreign competition–and they know who they are because they experience great losses. You can ask Mexican farmers, just like you can ask factory workers in Ohio. A big difference between rich countries and poor countries is what ends up happening to the losers. In the US, for example, we have things like unemployment compensation and trade adjustment assistance to soften the blow of foreign competition. Most poor countries do not have well-developed social safety nets. So people who lose out to market policies have to develop their own adjustment strategies. One of these is to emigrate and send money home.
Sending money home is a big complaint of conservatives: they have a huge bone to pick about that, how money made here is sent abroad. I have to counter that with: buikding a big wall was pretty silly when half that money could have ogne directly to job creation to keep people in mexico…but maybe i ma naive…
It depends. In some places with good land, large landowners buy up the land and use it to produce. It would be great if the businesses who bought up the land paid a good wage–then there would be less migration. The average salary for a farmhand in the places where I made the film was between $10-$15 a day. Sometimes the land is rented out to folks who don’t have the capital to be landowners themselves.
There’s a lot of silliness when it comes to the immigration debate! My goal in making the film was to help people understand why, for example, so much money gets sent home. The money that is sent to Mexico (”remittances”) is essential to the survival of millions of households. We need to get over ideology and look at this phenomenon practically. Lives are at stake–the debate needs to rise above politics.
re: the wall — border control alone is not the answer. We need to look at migration as the symptom of some larger social, economic, and political problems. And we should invest money in fixing those problems so that fewer people need to leave Mexico. Building a wall is like painting over a crack on a bridge….it’s symbolic, but doesn’t address the underlying structural problems.
Walls are always and everywhere a symbol of failure to solve social problems: Berlin Wall, Israeli wall, wall on U.S. south border, gated communities. You name an example of a wall, and human failure is the next thought.
Exactly. One thing you do in The Other Side of Immigration is to show the high price paid –families torn apart, people dying–huge risks taken to try to keep food on the table. One solution which was mentioned toward the end is a visiting workers program..it seems a good compromise. And AMerica is seen as the land opportunity–but as your subjects pointed out–12 to 14 hour work days, overcrowded housing, cruddy working consiitons….
Good point. The problem in politics is that there are often too many incentives not to learn from failure; as there are interests in perpetuating certain failures.
Building walls, like torture, like bombing, appears to be a simple solution to a complex problem. Never consider what the unintended outcomes and blowback might be. That would require more than 2 brain cells.
KO is displaying a complete lack of knowledge of the Brits’ WWII bombing of German cities, which was completely without merit, and strictly for revenge, and destroyed every German city within range long before KO’s report that Churchill questioned the bombing of Dresden.
Roy, you’re in some film festivals now with The Other Side…what’s the response been like?
I think a temporary labor program would be a good start. There is so much momentum behind these immigration flows and people will not stop coming anytime soon–so we should give people rights if they are here working hard. And many who come do not want to stay permanently. But they end up staying because it is so dangerous and expensive to come and go between Mexico and the US. I think any temporary labor program should provide Mexicans incentives to actually return home and invest in their home communities. How do you provide such incentives? For starters, the U.S. and Mexican government should establish a development fund that matches wages earned in the U.S. for productive investments in migrants’ home communities.
The response has been great. One man in Las Vegas described himself to me as more or less anti-immigrant before the screening. Afterwards he said he had a new level of understanding and empathy. Last Saturday, the screening in DC was followed by a discussion with the former US Sec. of Commerce and former director of US Customs and Immigration Services. We had a great debate.
If anyone is interested in hosting a screening, just let me know. You can contact me via the website – http://www.theothersideofimmigration.com
Awesome! And the music, btw was wonderful!
Thanks — I’m so grateful to My Morning Jacket, Bright Eyes, and Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band for getting behind this project. They’ve been so supportive.
America needs people to who will do jobs at a living wage (though as we saw in Made in LA, oftn undoc’d laborers are paid far less than that). Mnaufacturing, food industries, garment businesses all depend on undoc’d labor. What’s wierd is that you’d think with unemployment so high in US, there would be US citizens willing to take these gigs…
U.S. citizens can’t afford to take the jobs of illegal immigrants. Read Nickled & Dimed. Working at minimum wage is next to useless. Working for less than that, I don’t think so. In addition, rising U.S. unemployment is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the realizing the necessity of taking slave wages takes awhile.
Jobs that immigrants take throughout the world are sometimes called “3D jobs”: difficult, dirty, and dangerous.
That’s a polite description.
I was shocked ot learn that home health care workers were getting paid by the state of CA only $12 an hour..honestly I don;t know how people can live on minimum wages. And undoc’d workers certainly get shafted.
I admit–I have a lady come in to clean my house once a week. A friend told me I was over paying her because she takes home a little over $20 an hour, and he knows people who just pay $10. I was all “Uh, if it’s a job I can’t do and I need done, I will pay someone at least what I would want to be paid. That’s only fair.”
Geez, I pay my cleaning lady $30/hour. It’s supposed to take 4 hours @ $15, but it takes her 2 hours. She’s a gem and worth every penny. I don’t care what the market price is. And when I hired a full-time baby-sitter, I paid market rates (over 20 years ago so don’t remember the rate). Thinking back, though, I got a bargain. The people who work for low wages contribute much more than they are paid. It’s not a Q of supply and demand (said the economist), it’s a Q of power. Employers have it; workers don’t.
From watching Roy’s documentary and Made in LA, I got a real sense that there is very little opportunity in Mexico for advancement, it is hard ot build up capital and to invest, to get a head, and only by leaving can you hope to build a better future, if not for you then fo ryour family.
Courtesy of NAFTA? That has certainly put the Mexican farmers out of business. Don’t know about how the financial outcome prevents entrepreneurship in Mexico, but suspect it lies in the takeover of much of Mexican banking by U.S. financial institutions.
re: entrepreneurship — the big thing (in addition to having capital to invest) is education. That’s why any investment-subsidization programs in rural Mexico should also have an education and training component. With a loan from the World Bank, Mexico is working on a program that sounds pretty interesting in this regard…young people are provided capital and training to build greenhouses, produce agricultural goods more efficiently, and market their products. The program is called Fondo de Tierras e Instalación del Joven Emprendedor Rural. More info (in Spanish) here: http://www.sra.gob.mx/internet…..sumen.html
Roy, do you htk we’ll see immigration reform under Obama?
ANd what are plans for the film’s wider release?
I sure hope so… but with so many problems right now, who knows? But of all the presidential candidates (if I remember correctly), Obama was the only to advocate greater cooperation with Mexico on immigration issues. So I’m hopeful in that regard. Over all, if the administration is going to tackle immigration, they need to bring on people who understand Mexico and the larger causes and effects of the immigration process so our policies don’t keep failing. I’d be happy to help out if they’re looking for people with expertise in these areas : )
How can Mexico, no matter how well trained, compete with U.S. subsidized ag? I am a complete doubter about “education” as the solution to the world’s, and every country within the world’s, economic problems. To be sure, that’s true in the long run, but opponents of fairness are using it in the short run as an excuse to maintain the unfair status quo.
No plans yet. This is my first film and I’m still hoping to get distribution but don’t have the big connections : ) I made this film on my own (no crew!), with my own savings (i.e., miniscule budget). So if anyone out there believes in this message, wants to offer any funding, or wants to help me get this film into neighborhood movie theaters, homes, universities, you name it — please send me an email (director@theothersideofimmigration.com).
Thank you firepups and Roy for a thoughtful discussion about an issue that affects me daily here in Los Angeles–and affects out nation as a whole. Roy, thnak you for making a film that changes people’s minds and makes them think!
Thanks so much for inviting me, Lisa! I really enjoyed the discussion. Be in touch…