On June 21, residents of Fremont, a small meatpacking town just outside Omaha, Nebraska, voted by 57 percent to deny work and shelter to undocumented immigrants. Why Fremont, Nebraska, and why now? Some observers, not knowing the Fremont measure was cooked up by the same coalition that passed Arizona’s law — Kansas City lawyer Kris Kobach, for example, was involved in both measures — are calling it a homegrown, heartland, good ole Nebraskan approach to solving the immigration problem. The fact is that numerous dynamics have combined to make immigration particularly explosive in Fremont...
Starting with corn comes naturally to me. I grew up surrounded by it, on our family farm about thirty miles southwest of Fremont. Back in 1891, my German great-grandparents acquired the farm...Like farms across Nebraska, these days, ours grows mostly corn.... In 1932, Nebraska produced 250 million bushels of corn; by 2009 that figure had risen to 1.5 billion bushels, while the amount of acreage devoted to corn production dipped slightly. Meanwhile, massive government subsidies allow farmers to sell their corn for much less than it costs to produce it. Our farm receives more than $10,000 in direct government subsidies, plus another $15,000 or so for conservation techniques such as planting grass buffers or using GPS technology for maximal efficiency when we spray herbicide across our 450 acres. This $25,000 means that some years as much as one-third of our profit comes from the federal government.
All this lowers the cost of corn production in Nebraska and, combined with globalization, it has generated soaring corn exports from the United States to Mexico. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 required that Mexico eliminate both tariffs that protected corn farmers as well as a measure in its constitution forbidding the sale of communal peasant lands. Mexican tariffs on corn were gradually reduced and finally ended altogether in 2008.
These changes have meant the loss of at least 1.5 million agricultural jobs in Mexico. U.S. corn exports now constitute one-fifth of Mexican corn consumption, a tripling in volume since the passage of NAFTA...The decline of peasant agriculture, the resulting rise in unemployment, the increase in food costs, and concerns about importation of genetically modified seed corn have led to massive protests across Mexico... Meanwhile, as farmers and farm employees have been pushed off the land, they increasingly look to emigration to the United States—and to towns like Fremont—for work. As Harley Shaiken has observed,
“The beginnings of immigration are in the displacement of farmers in Mexico.”TO SEE how it works, keep following the corn. The 35,000 bushels of corn our farm produces go first to the nearby Farmers’ Cooperative grain elevator... It holds onto the corn for a few months and then sells most — two-thirds of it — to grain dealers. They in turn ship the corn in rail cars to Texas, California, or, very often, to Mexico, which is the top foreign destination for Nebraska corn... Meanwhile, one-quarter of the Co-op’s corn goes to feed Nebraska cattle, and there lies the final key to the Nebraska-Mexico economy of today...
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3677
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