Immigration Policy
Letters from the August 13-20, 2018, Issue
Written July 19, 2018 [minor elisions, insertions]
Re The Nation’s July 16/23 special issue, “Needed: A New Foreign Policy”: Truer words were never written. But there’s a puzzling aspect here as well. The one issue that has mobilized Americans politically today—immigration reform—appears only as a minor point [in of foreign policy]. The growing inequality among nations, which is the ultimate cause of the immigration problem, is presented as an aspect of economic growth, or as a blot on our humanitarian values, and it’s both. [Local and national level reforms are urgent, But the causes [of immigration] are international. Shouldn’t it be front and center [a foreign policy issue also?] Only international measures can ultimately deal with it. Yet Trump is strikingly oblivious to its causes.
Peter Marcuse
santa barbara, calif.
The above appeared as a letter to the editor of The Nation. But, apart from the omission of consideration o the relationship between home immigration /emigration issues and foreign policies, there are a number of other concerns that should be highlighted in any serious reconsideration of foreign policy for the United States. I list only a few briefly here, and hope they will be developed further shortly in the Nation’s 4-part series, which is still incomplete as I write this, and elsewhere.
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What are the practical and political implications of this analysis?
Only to mention a few:[1]
An International Fair Labor Standards Agreement, whose agenda could include wage, working conditions, protection of rights toorganizx, transparency. Possibly integrated into tariff considerations? Environmental standards for goods in international commerce?
An international enforcement agency, with provision for fines for violation as financing?International labor code or standards, and reqilrement for posting on products and disclosure
Tariff policy on goods where code compliance not transparently posted?
International support for right to organize as human right
Spelling out local legal status of rights provisions of international law?
International standards for fair elections, with international non-recognition of results of non-complying designation of holders of key political offices ?
Major economic development assistance (Marshall Plan (for hight emigration countries)?
An International Fair Labor Agenda?
With an enforcement agency, and recipient of fines for violation as financing?
International labor code or standards, and reqilrement for posting on products and disclosure?
Tariff policy on goods where code compliance not transparently posted?
International support for right to organize as human right?
Clear, comprehensive, and legally enforceable provisions for prevention of discrimination against members of any group defined by ethnicity, color, gender, or culture.
Minimum standards for public education, with coordinated international assistance?S
Economic development assistance for high emigration countries?
All seen as legitimate agenda items for foreign policy debates and international agreements.
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Clearly pie n the sky, in terms of actual formal implementation. But perhaps useful as a statement of goals and basis for a vision of what an international democratic and humane world order might look like?
To put up against the vision of an international world order led by an “again great America,” whose leadership is voluntarily accepted by the rest of the world, despite its own internal failure to adopt such proclaimed standards or act as an active and open-minded model for others on the world stage?
Not “Americans to make America Great for Americans Again,” but
But “All Together to Help Make the World Freer, More Equal, and More Democratic for All. Now.”
[1] A number of more detailed and thought-throug of veersions of such a list, intheform of social movement and political and religious and humanistic groups, and deserve coordinated and serious study.
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