The Human Face of Economic Globalization: Mexican Migrants and their Support for Free Trade

Economic globalization is loosely defined as lowering international barriers to the movement of economic goods and services (including capital and labor). The standard argument since political economist David Ricardo is that lowering such barriers improves everyone's circumstances due to the ability to capitalize on each nation's comparative advantages (e.g. Ricardo 1895). He demonstrated that, even if one nation is more efficient at producing everything than some other nation, even then it is still Pareto superior to exchange on comparative advantage. It is this basic notion that leads to the implication that increased flows of goods and services, of capital and labor alike, lead to Pareto improvements: that is, these increased flows make at least some (and in principle all) better off, and no one worse off. However, labor flows, and especially the lowering of barriers to entry of labor, remain highly contentious.While lowering barriers to trades and goods yields widely dispersed benefits (such as lower costs for consumers), the costs can be highly concentrated (e.g. the demise of the U.S. textile industry). A key strategy advanced industrialized nations can use to adapt to these costs is to open borders: that is, to lower barriers to flows of labor, permitting cheaper labor to migrate. In the U.S., the relative permeability of borders has led millions of Latinos to migrate to the U.S. to take jobs that both pay better and are more plentiful here than in their home countries (Massey and Espinoza 1997). The "human face" of this policy has created a pool of between three and five million agricultural migrant workers in the U.S., 80% of whom are foreign immigrants (and 90% of these foreign workers are Mexican, Magana and Hovey 2003).Mexican farm workers who immigrate to the U.S. provide an interesting setting for thinking about these issues. They move here for economic reasons. Typically, they come here to earn higher wages than they could receive at home, with the intention of sending any excess above living costs back to their families. While this is a palpable benefit to these workers, some in the U.S. are concerned that the workers seem to be exploited when one compares their fortunes to those of typical Americans. Indeed, the farm workers themselves are very clear that their standard of living, especially in the migrant farm worker communities, is low in absolute terms.Given that many immigrants are undocumented, the more unscrupulous among their employers are able to exploit the workers' situation by not providing decent housing or safe working conditions. They know that it is unlikely that the farm workers themselves will be in a situation to complain. They are not in that position because there are barriers to entry (that is, they need governmental approval and documentation to legally enter the U.S. and its work force), and if they avoid such barriers by undocumented entry, they are vulnerable to this exploitation. In the usual economic sense, the entire set of partners to this set of exchanges are made better off nonetheless; and so, this is a strictly Pareto superior outcome, even if many might conclude that there is clearly a system of exploitation here as well. As Amartya Sen once pointed out (1970, p.22), "In short, a society or an economy can be Pareto-optimal and still be perfectly disgusting."In this context, it seems particularly important to understand the attitudes and choices made by those at the front lines of the issues, as it were. And thus, we return to the question of how Latino migrant workers react to economic globalization - do they tend to support it or oppose it, and why? One could simply measure their support for globalization. However, an even more useful way to evaluate this question is to study how these workers react to the globalization debate itself: the pro- and con- messages which constitute that debate. Gauging how they react to these messages will first reveal if their support for free trade increases or decreases depending on the type of message, but it will also reveal the magnitude of the changes, demonstrating how susceptible the workers' free trade attitudes are to persuasion. …