TNAG-1066-FCO40-1316-Human-rights-in-Hong-Kong-1981 — Page 225

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Annex II page 42

as evidenced by the fact that Mexico City will be the largest city in the world in the

in the next decade with over 25 million people. Because Mexico cannot create enough jobs to accommodate its citizens, we can expect the pressure for outmigration to the U.S. to continue for years.

"

132. It had become evident that the 20 000 numbers available to Mexico under current

current immigration law do not go far to meet the tremendous demand which has built up, that even the 50 000 places recently proposed by the Administration under a tempor- ary worker programme may not bridge the gap and that clan- destine border crossers may therefore continue to cause concern in the United States. Annual net illegal immigration is generally assumed to be well in excess of 100 000 (by no means all of it from Mexico or its neighbours, however), and it may, some observers say, approach half a million.

The United States, which became the champion of the human right to emi- grate, has had to face the corollary of the right to immigrate. There may

may be a body of illegal Mexican migrants in the US reaching well into seven figures, although a Mexican expert on immigration has given it as his opinion that the number of undocumented Mexicans who have taken up residence in the US is

taken up more than 150 000 (Mr. Jorge Bustamente, Director of the US Mexican border studies program at El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City).

to

133. Sufficient opportunity for successful employment in the US maintains the flow. Jobs "open" to undocumented immigrants are reportedly mostly those concentrated in the agricultural sector and the competitive small-scale manufacturing sector where the immigrants occupy positions which are the lowest paid, least attractive and most insecure, thus filling the bottom positions in a fragmented US labour market. The flow has been sensitive the most extreme fluctuations in the business cycle. Analysts suggest that immigration and particularly illegal immigration help to maintain the rate of profit for those agricultural and non-monopoly sectors of capital which are incapable of drawing on the mechanisms open to monopoly capital for maintaining an adequate level of surplus. "These economic relations", says one informed observer, are maintained by the political weakness of the

of the immigrant worker. The fact that immigrants face employers as aliens, without the rights of citizenship, afraid of deportation and essentially removed from the protection of labour unions, enforces the character of their cheap labour.

The conditions of a nineteenth century working class, which American labor struggled so

so hard to end, are apparently recreated. "2/

...

2/ Robert I. Bach, "Mexican Immigration and the American State".

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