PERSPECTIVE ON NAFTA : Take the Long View of Immigration : Supply and demand in low-wage fields will keep numbers high for awhile, but they will diminish faster with U.S. action to bridge the gap.

By WAYNE A. CORNELIUS and PHILIP L. MARTIN

Nov. 2, 1993 12 AM PT

<i> Wayne A. Cornelius is director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. Philip L. Martin is professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis and the author of "Trade and Migration: NAFTA and Agriculture," published by the Institute for International Economics. </i>

Even as the House of Representatives voted $45 million to hire 600 new Border Patrol agents, and as politicians of both parties clamored for harsher measures to reduce illegal immigration along our border with Mexico, the one proposal that could make a real dent in unauthorized migration was languishing in Congress.

As Atty. Gen. Janet Reno bluntly put it, “NAFTA is our best hope for reducing illegal migration in the long haul. If it fails, effective immigration control will become impossible.”

Most immigration specialists on both sides of the border concur. But they also expect NAFTA to produce a temporary increase in Mexico-to-U.S. migration--a “migration hump.” Herein lies much of the continuing confusion over the probable impact of North American free trade on labor migration.

Advocates of NAFTA vigorously assert that the agreement will cut the flow of Mexican workers into the United States. Opponents just as fervently criticize NAFTA as a probable stimulus to illegal immigration. Both sides are correct, within their respective time frames; but it is only the supporters of NAFTA who are willing to take the long view.

After the agreement has been in effect for a decade, immigration from Mexico should fall to less than half the level of the 1980s, and the decline should become steadily larger thereafter.

But NAFTA would link countries whose labor markets are already closely integrated, through ever-expanding family and employer networks. Generations of migration have converted what were once winding paths into freeways that link Mexican workers to U.S. jobs, despite tighter border controls.

Some of the Mexicans who would otherwise head north might be encouraged to remain in Mexico to fill jobs created by the higher levels of domestic and foreign investment attracted by NAFTA. But it will not immediately reduce the pull of “low-wage” U.S. jobs, which at least initially will continue to pay more than even skilled employment in Mexico.

Moreover, most of the first wave of NAFTA-induced job creation in Mexico will bypass the principal sources of U.S.-bound migrations: backward rural areas in central and southern Mexico that have no attraction to investors.

For climatic reasons, California will remain North America’s salad bowl even after agricultural tariffs are eliminated, ensuring jobs for Mexican workers who get here. And in rural Mexico, NAFTA will accelerate transformations already under way, caused by recent free-market reforms of the land tenure and crop subsidy systems, that may intensify incentives for emigration. The agreement commits Mexico to reducing guaranteed prices for corn, currently almost twice world levels.

The migration hump cannot be wished away, but U.S. and Mexican policies could make it small in size and short in duration.

On the U.S. side, more vigorous enforcement of immigration, labor and tax laws could help to reduce the demand for Mexican workers, especially in agriculture and construction, where labor contractors--whose raison d’etre is their ability to evade enforcement--have become major employers of unauthorized migrants.

Whatever the fate of NAFTA, the 1990s are destined to be years of high Mexico-to-U.S. migration, dampened only by the length and depth of the recession in key receiving states like California. Thus, even in the short term, NAFTA is likely to add only marginally to current migration flows. The labor-displacing changes associated with Mexico’s ongoing free-market revolution will happen anyway.

Something must be done to begin the process of narrowing U.S./Mexico wage and living-standard differentials, if unwanted migration between the two countries is ever to be curtailed. The implementation of NAFTA as scheduled is the most important step needed to initiate this process.

The real question is whether Congress can summon the political will and vision to do what is necessary to turn the existing trend around. Labor migration has more often been a source of tension than cooperation between the United States and Mexico. NAFTA offers both countries the chance to deal constructively with the immigration issue, by permitting U.S. capital and Mexican labor to work together in Mexico instead of in the United States.