- Well, it could have been true.
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- 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.
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- At the height of the search for the professional liar's
imaginary nonterrorists, Clinton blamed Canada and its "unpatrolled,
unsupervised" border. But even when the hoax came to light, she didn't
rescind the accusation: Because the Canadian border is so porous, she reasoned,
"this hoax seemed all too believable."
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- 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.
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- 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 Vicente 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 to cheap labor? How do 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.
-
-
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- Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at
the Brand Bullies (Picador) and, most recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches
>From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (Picador).
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- Copyright © 2003 The Nation
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- By Naomi Klein
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