The Rise of the Fortress Continent
by Naomi Klein
Dissident Voice
January 16, 2003
Well, it could
have been true.
That's what
Senator Hillary Clinton had to say after finding out that five Pakistani men
did not actually sneak into the United States through Canada so they could blow
up New York on New Year's Eve. Because they were never in the United States at
all, and they weren't terrorists, and the whole thing was dreamed up by a man
who forges passports for a living.
At the height of
the search for the professional liar's imaginary non-terrorists, Clinton had
blamed Canada and its "unpatrolled, unsupervised" border. But even
when the hoax came to light, Clinton didn't rescind the accusation: Because the
Canadian border is so porous, she reasoned, "this hoax seemed all too
believable." It was, in other words, a useful hoax, helping US citizens to
see how unsafe they really are. And that is useful, especially if you are among
the growing number of free-market economists, politicians and military
strategists pushing for the creation of "Fortress NAFTA," a
continental security perimeter stretching from Mexico's southern border to
Canada's northern one.
A fortress
continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade
terms from other countries-while patrolling their shared external borders to
keep people from those countries out. But if a continent is serious about being
a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls,
because somebody has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.
It's a model
being pioneered in Europe, where the European Union is currently expanding to include
ten poor Eastern bloc countries, at the same time that it uses increasingly
aggressive security methods to deny entry to immigrants from even poorer
countries, like Iraq and Nigeria.
It took the
events of September 11 for North America to get serious about building a
fortress continent of its own. After the attacks, it wasn't an option for the
United States to simply build higher walls at the Canadian and Mexican
borders-in the NAFTA era, the business community wouldn't stand for it. General
Motors claims that for every minute its trucks are delayed at the US-Canadian
border, it loses about $650,000.
On the other US
border, dozens of industries, from agriculture to construction, are reliant on
"illegal" Mexican workers-a fact not lost on George W. Bush, who
knows that, after oil, immigrant labor is the fuel driving the Southwest
economy. If he suddenly cut off the flow, the business sector would rebel. So
what's a wildly pro-business, security-obsessed government to do?
Easy: Move the
border. Turn the Mexican and Canadian borders into glorified checkpoints and
seal off the entire continent, from Guatemala to the Arctic Circle. Bush
officials don't talk much about the continental fortress, preferring terms like
"North American area of mutual confidence." But a US-run security
perimeter is precisely what is being built. In the past year, Washington has
pressured Canada and Mexico to harmonize their refugee, immigration and visa
laws with US policies. And in July 2001, Mexican President Vincente Fox introduced
Plan Sur, a massive security operation on Mexico's southern frontier that
immigration experts refer to as "the southern migration" of the US
border.
Under Plan Sur,
the Mexican government has deported hundreds of thousands of mainly Central Americans
on their way to the United States. And the United States has been providing
much of the funding. In one bizarre incident last year, Mexican guards caught a
group of Indian refugees on their way to the United States, bused them to a
squalid refugee detention center in Guatemala, and Washington paid the cost
($8.50 a day per detainee).
Fox had hoped to
be rewarded for policing the undeclared US southern border, and he used to have
reason for optimism. As recently as September 6, 2001, Bush was pledging to
"normalize" the status of the roughly 4.5 million Mexicans living
illegally in the United States. After September 11, however, the status of
these workers became even more precarious.
This points to
another truth about fortress continents: Being on the inside may be better than
being locked out, but it's no guarantee of equal status. Washington is
constructing a kind of three-tiered fortress in which the United States rules
by decree, Canada and Mexico serve as guards and Mexican workers are banished
to the continental equivalent of the servants' quarters.
Across the
Atlantic, a similar three-tiered process is under way. Inside Fortress Europe,
France and Germany are the nobility and lesser powers like Spain and Portugal
are the sentinels. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic are the
postmodern serfs, providing the low-wage factories where clothes, electronics
and cars are produced for 20-25 percent of what it would cost to make them in
Western Europe-the EU's own maquiladoras.
The huge
greenhouses of southern Spain, meanwhile, have stopped hiring Moroccans to pick
the strawberries. They are giving the jobs instead to white-skinned Poles and
Romanians, while speedboats equipped with infrared sensors patrol the
coastline, intercepting ships of North Africans. Increasingly, the EU is making
"repatriation agreements" an explicit condition of new trade deals:
We'll take your products, the Euros say to South America and Africa, as long as
we can send your people back.
What we are
seeing is the emergence of a genuinely new New World Order, one far more
Darwinian than the First, Second and Third World. The new divisions are between
fortress continents and locked-out continents. For locked-out continents, even
their cheap labor isn't needed, and their countries are left to beg outside the
gates for a half-decent price for wheat and bananas.
Inside the
fortress continents, a new social hierarchy has been engineered to reconcile
the seemingly contradictory political priorities of the post-September 11 era.
How do you have air-tight borders and still maintain access cheap labor? How to
you expand for trade, and still pander to the anti-immigrant vote? How do you
stay open to business, and stay closed to people?
Easy: First you
expand the perimeter. Then you lock down.
Naomi Klein is a leading anti-sweatshop activist, and author of Fences and
Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate? (Picador,
2002) and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2000) This
article first appeared in The Nation.
Visit www.nologo.org.