Trade Justice And Immigration Justice Are Intimately Tied Together

Above: Immigration Families Have No Borders. From Associated Press.

Trade policy with Mexico and Central America has direct results in the lives of entire communities who are left without economic opportunity by the reshuffling of economic power through trade deals. Just as the free market policies of the original NAFTA left thousands of farmworkers unemployed and seeking better opportunities in the United States. But Trump’s economic nationalism is the promise of a failed model where capital moves freely but workers are punished for moving amongst these same borders.

Trump’s economic policy is the promise of the lack of humanity when capital reigns above the well-being of workers, of families, of children. Action on trade must be taken in the context of a whole socio-economic panorama in which social justice should be a principal objective. There can be no trade justice when immigrants are literally being separated from their families to prohibit them from participating in the social and economic life of the United States while escaping dire situations at home. There will be no justice while the victims of a system rigged against the poor and working classes throughout the Americas are continually attacked.

This is why we are insisting that you take action by supporting the organizations that are taking action on the ground. This week, Mijente published the six things everyone who is trying to stop the separation of children from their families must know:

1. DHS will receive more money to create new family prisons that will hold parents and children together, while the parents are being criminally prosecuted and while their deportation cases are pending.
2. Given that criminal prosecutions and deportation cases of parents can take long periods of time, and that children are supposed to be detained along with their parents, Sessions will try to get the courts to grant him the ability to detain children indefinitely.
3. Trump and Sessions will continue to implement their “Zero Tolerance” policy and prosecute everyone detained at the border.
4. The Department of Defense will help provide spaces, like army bases, for these family prisons, and build new ones as needed. Other cabinet-level departments are being recruited to do the same.
5. Sessions will be given more resources to deport families faster after they are prosecuted and appropriate the funding if needed.
6. The order does not speak to any families that have already been separated — and existing policies place the responsibility on parents to find their children in HHS custody and seek to reunite with them.

Join our campaign, Trade for People and Planet, we will keep fighting for dignity and in recognition of the interconnection of trade justice with the fight for justice for all.