[A-List] US imperialism: gated communities

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Fortress continents

The US and Europe are both creating multi-tiered regional strongholds

Naomi Klein
Thursday January 16, 2003
The Guardian

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 US through Canada so they could blow up New York on New Year's Eve.
Because they were never in the US at all, and they weren't terrorists, and
the whole thing was dreamt 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
favourable 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 10 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 US simply to 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 fleet of trucks is 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 Bush, who knows that, after oil, immigrant labour 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 harmonise
their refugee, immigration and visa laws with US policies. And in July 2001,
Mexico's 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 US, with the US itself providing much of the funding. In
one bizarre incident last year, Mexican guards caught a group of Indian
refugees on their way to the US, bussed them to a squalid refugee detention
centre 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 "normalise" the status of the roughly 4.5 million
Mexicans living illegally in the US. 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 US
rules by decree, Canada and Mexico serve as guards, and Mexican workers are
banished to the continental equivalent of the servants' quarters.

Inside Fortress Europe, France and Germany are the nobility and lesser
powers such as 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% of the cost to make them in western Europe.

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 infra-red
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 Europeans 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 labour 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 airtight borders and still access
cheap labour? How do you expand for trade, and still pander to the
anti-immigrant vote? How do you stay open to business and closed to people?
Easy. First you expand the perimeter. Then you lock down.

· This article first appeared in the Nation. Naomi Klein is the author of No
Logo and Fences and Windows