Association for Development, Education, Leadership, Advocacy and Service/The Border Campaign

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Articles relating to the border issues and environmental justice:

Dysfunction Consumption

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

National Geographic Blog addresses Recycling E-Waste

Recycling Questions About Recycling
All-Terrain (Blog title)
By Tom Zeller, Jr.
Posted Jan 3, 2008

Puter In Chris Carroll’s excellent piece for the January issue of this magazine, he notes that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an estimated 30 to 40 million PCs will be ready for what is called, rather euphemistically, “end-of-life management” in each of the next few years.

That is to say, as with nearly all electronics, which are well on the way to obsolescence even as they roll off the assembly line, consumers will soon be chucking ‘em for newer models.

How many folks will be doing THAT in the postholiday hullabaloo, eh? And as Chris notes, it ain’t just computers:

A switchover to digital high-definition television broadcasts is scheduled to be complete by 2009, rendering inoperable TVs that function perfectly today but receive only an analog signal. As viewers prepare for the switch, about 25 million TVs are taken out of service yearly. In the fashion-conscious mobile market, 98 million U.S. cell phones took their last call in 2005. All told, the EPA estimates that in the U.S. that year, between 1.5 and 1.9 million tons of computers, TVs, VCRs, monitors, cell phones, and other equipment were discarded. If all sources of electronic waste are tallied, it could total 50 million tons a year worldwide, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Some of this technojunk, about 70 percent, ends up in the nation’s landfills, where the once vital, now toxic lifeblood of these deceased machines—lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium—can slowly leach into the environment.

But a growing share is being channeled to a burgeoning “recycling market”—which, as Chris’s piece highlights, can often mean export to a vast and unregulated emporium in the developing world, where components are melted, smelted, and resold for pennies on the dollar in toxic sweatshop conditions.

You can check out some of the potentially hazardous components of a typical personal computer here.

Meanwhile, alongside Chris’s piece this month, I circled back to the broader question of recycling in general, in an attempt to revisit that hot-button question that so vexed the political poles back in the 1980s and ’90s, when barges laden with trash were floating haplessly without a home (remember the Mobro?), and John Tierney of the New York Times famously opined in 1996 that “Recycling Is Garbage.”

Back then, there was a lot of hyperbole being thrown around on both sides of the political spectrum. Environmentalists were quick to argue that we were running out of landfill space (not really true).

And on the flip side, opponents of recycling argued that the environmental footprint caused by recycling was greater than landfilling or other forms of waste disposal—and more expensive to boot (this was Tierney’s argument). Well, at the time, this was true—sometimes and only due to inefficiencies in the way recycling was being undertaken.

Think big, C02-belching trucks repeating garbage pickup routes while hauling minimal amounts of recyclable materials far afield to regional processing facilities. The energy sinks often eclipsed the recycling gains—both in terms of dollars and environmental impacts—before the last pickups were made.

RecycleAs it is, though, more than 10 years later, municipalities have become much better recovering various bits of the waste stream—from paper packaging, glass and aluminum to yard waste and other refuse—and cycling it back into the manufacturing process, either as new products of the same kind, or repurposing it for other uses.

And when measured over the entire lifespan of a product, the savings, in terms of energy (which in translate into dollar savings and a smaller environmental footprint), can be substantial. From my piece this month, which included comments from Matthew Hale, director of EPA’s Office of Solid Waste.

Consider the true cost of a product over its entire life—from harvesting the raw materials to creating, consuming, and disposing of it—and the scale tips dramatically in recycling’s favor. Every shrink-wrapped toy or tool or medical device we buy bears the stamp of its energy-intensive history: mountains of ore that have been mined (bauxite, say, for aluminum cans), coal plants and oil refineries, railcars, assembly lines. A product’s true cost includes greenhouse gases emitted in its creation as well as use, and pollutants that cause acid rain, smog, and fouled waterways.

Recycling—substituting scrap for virgin materials—not only conserves natural resources and reduces the amount of waste that must be burned or buried, it also reduces pollution and the demand for energy. “You get tremendous Btu savings,” Hale says.

(Btu are British Thermal Units, a unit of energy measure used in the United States. It is defined the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. One million Btu equals nearly the same energy as in eight gallons of gasoline.)

Of course, folks in the U.S. aren’t recycling at nearly the rate of other countries in the developing world, particularly in Europe, where government regulations spur both consumers and manufacturers to the task with a bit more fervor.

And even better at saving energy than recycling? Reducing the amount of waste each of us generates in the first place, and reusing materials that are perfectly serviceable, rather than discarding them after one use.

BORDER PATROL – Sierra. May-June 1994

BURIED AMIDST THE BOMBAST AND PIE CHARTS OF LAST November’s “debate” between Al Gore and Ross Perot on the North American Free Trade Agreement was a fleeting moment in which the billionaire Texan held a videocassette up to the camera and told 20 million cable viewers that the documentary showed “a major U.S. chemical plant in Mexico that digs holes in the ground, dumps the chemical waste in those holes, bulldozes over those holes and contaminates the water supply for the people in that area.”

While Perot paused to reload, .a squirming Gore pleaded, “Can I respond? Can I respond?” But the moderator, Washington talkshow host Larry King, soon broke for a commercial and never returned to the mysterious chemical plant in the unnamed Mexican town (as we will a bit later).

No one knows how many NAFTAfarians realized what place Perot was talking about, but 2,000 miles away, in the Tex-Mex border town of Brownsville, Texas, the man who brought that chemical plant and the surrounding community to the world’s attention was savoring Perot’s every word.

For Domingo Gonzalez, cofounder of the Texas-based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, which produced the documentary, Perot’s plug on national television, albeit vague, was a stunning achievement. “When Perot held up our videotape,” Gonzalez told me later, “it was like hitting a home run. We felt our work was finally paying off.”

You may never have heard of Domingo Gonzalez–that suits him fine–but perhaps more than anyone, this 45-year-old Brownsville native has helped shape world opinion about health conditions along the border, specifically around the foreign-owned maquiladoras, or assembly plants, in Brownsville’s sister city of Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande. In the pre-NAFTA frenzy of the past four years the former migrant worker turned career activist has taken at least a hundred U.S. and foreign journalists, five congressional delegations, and dozens of labor, religious, and environmental groups across the border for a look at the industrial wasteland that is Matamoros.

Journalists from Amsterdam, Tokyo, Madrid, Munich, Sao Paulo, London, Toronto, Mexico City, and Paris have all come calling on Gonzalez. When Rolling Stone writer William Greider outlined NAFTAs faults two years ago, the first two words of his column were, naturally, Domingo Gonzalez. When ABC’s Primetime Live investigated the border’s alarming number of anencephalic births–babies born with partial or missing brains, a condition some health experts believe is connected to the maquilas’ use of mutagenic solvents–Gonzalez was just off-camera most of the time, leading the way to mothers, doctors, and factory workers.

It was not by accident that many of the world media’s bleak portraits of life around the maquilas came from Matamoros. Gonzalez made it easy by offering up articulate victims, corporate bad guys, cooperative experts, historical context, and, most important, directions through the town’s rutted, unmarked alleys–with a minimum of the preachy sales pitch that annoys most mainstream journalists.

“There are few like Domingo,” says National Public Radio reporter John Burnett, who has worked extensively along the border. “He not only understands, emotionally and technically, the issues raised by pollution, but in a maze of industrial plants he knows right where to go.”

Environmental reporter Dave Harmon, of The Monitor in nearby McAllen, Texas, says Gonzalez serves as a conduit for Matamoros residents too fearful or unsophisticated to contact the U.S. media themselves. “Let’s face it,” Harmon says. “If you’re some gringo down here from Boston and you have to knock out a story in a few days, you can’t do it without someone like Domingo.”

Indulging reporters’ deadlines as well as their frequent misconceptions of the region, the ever-patient Gonzalez treats each one as if he or she were producing the definitive border expose. He takes them to see some of the “Mallory children,” 70 or so youths with facial deformities and mental retardation whose mothers worked with solvents and PCBs in the 1960s and ’70s at the now-closed Mallory capacitor plant. He takes them by an accident-plagued pesticide factory where workers are so close to a neighborhood they can shake hands with residents over their backyard fences. In the shadow of Fortune 500 maquilas, Gonzalez walks reporters past acrid, milky-white ditches laced with xylene, the Rio Grande floating with human excrement, and gritty, oblivious kids playing beneath railroad tank cars carrying ammonia and hydrofluoric acid.

The tours rarely fail to have the desired effect. During one such visit, Ohio Representative Marcie Kaptur and an entourage of journalists were strolling past a rainbow-hued industrial canal when a chicken wobbled by, took a sip from the ditch, and promptly dropped dead at Kaptur’s feet. “Gee,” she told reporters, “this really tells the story.”

Were Kaptur and the journalists being manipulated? The toxic tours tell only some of the story, but Gonzalez doesn’t conceal his allegiances or motives, and reporters allow for his bias just as they do for that of the maquila mangers who profess ignorance about illegal chemical-dumping and child labor. “There’s nothing so ugly to reporters,” Gonzalez says, “as to feel they’re being set up. Sometimes we do so little ‘setting up’ that we look totally disorganized. When you’re as loose as we are,” he laughs, “it’s easy to make everything look spontaneous.”

Before last year’s NAFTA vote Gonzalez’s toxic tour became so popular, he was crossing the old Brownsville bridge over the foul Rio Grande several times a day with camera crews in tow. Colonia residents soon became blase about all the photographers and boom mikes. Not so Gonzalez’s enemies. The resulting negative publicity so upset the Matamoros maquila association that, according to Mexican newspaper reporters, the association president asked the city council to have Gonzalez and five other activists investigated by Mexico’s thuggish Interior Ministry. Such “investigations” are not taken lightly in a country where, over the last decade, human-rights groups have documented many government-linked deaths of journalists, labor leaders, and opposition political activists.

“We sort of tease Domingo about the danger,” says his friend Rose Farmer, the manager of an Audubon preserve near Brownsville. “But it’s a real concern. He is at risk.”

“Domingo is really quite a phenomenon because he accomplishes things,” says Chris Whalen, editor of the conservative, Washington, D.C.-based newsletter The Mexico Report, and one who has investigated human-rights abuses in Mexico. “I’m really surprised the Mexican government hasn’t had him killed.”

THREE YEARS AGO, I TOO WAS LOOKING FOR that perfect border metaphor, that community-as-microcosm story that embraces all the elements of the environmental and social disaster that has befallen the region since the maquila program brought industrialization 30 years ago. When word-of-mouth eventually led me to Gonzalez, he flattered me by listening–he never interrupts–as though my journalistic search were daring and novel, which it decidedly wasn’t.

He paused in thought to let me know the enormity of this task, then winked and smiled. “I think I know where to take you,” he told me. Few scenes in the Third World, and nothing in the United States, not even the neighborhoods around the world’s largest concentration of petrochemical plants near where I grew up in Houston, prepared me for the sight of a tiny Matamoros colonia called Privada Uniones. This is the place that so appalled Ross Perot–and that Gonzalez makes sure all visiting journalists see.

No more than a patch of land roughly 50 by 200 yards, Privada Uniones contains some 30 homes made mostly of plywood and corrugated tin. The shacks are surrounded by chemical plants, a rail line that supplies them, and a grain warehouse that covers the neighborhood in fumigated-corn dust. The residents of this industrial hell, who all seem to have wracking coughs, don’t just live close to the chemical plants–their tiny homes virtually adjoin them. On one side is the former site of Quimica Retzloff, whose abandoned pesticide-waste pit is no more than 20 feet from residents’ kitchens and yards. Separated from the plant by only a cinder-block wall, the pesticide holding pond would sometimes overflow in heavy rains, seep through the soil and kill the neighbors’ gardens. That was, however, the least of their concerns. In 1983, a chemical leak at Retzloff killed most of the colonia’s chickens and dogs; in December 1990, two 55-gallon drums of methamidophos pesticide exploded, lofting a chemical cloud over Matamoros that sent 90 people to the hospital. The plant finally closed last year, but the site has never been cleaned.

Opposite Retzloff is the Mexican-owned affiliate of Northfield, Illinois-based Stepan Chemical, one of the United States’ largest makers of surfactants, which help disperse chemicals in everything from pesticides to toothpaste. Stepan, too, has had problems, experiencing an ammonia leak and an explosion that broke windows and TV screens throughout the colonia. (Stepan paid for repairs.) In the summer of 1991, a year after the residents first sought Gonzalez’s help, he and I walked along a ditch that came out of Stepan’s property rust-red with chemical wastes. Inside Stepan’s fences, maybe a hundred feet from the residents’ homes, was an uncovered and unlined toxic dump where workers would empty drums of chemicals.

Privada Uniones was fed up. Community leaders, who had been documenting the tragedies around them since the early 1980s, had appealed unsuccessfully to every level of Mexican authority. They were ignored until Gonzalez and the U.S. news media showed interest.

The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras had the canal tested by the Boston-based National Toxics Campaign, whose EPA-approved lab helps environmental groups document industrial pollution. The results showed the ditch contained the solvent xylene at 23.2 million parts per billion–roughly 50,000 times the U.S. drinking-water standard. (Xylene can cause brain hemorrhaging as well as lung, liver, and kidney damage.) An organizer for the AFL-CIO, a Coalition partner, began videotaping workers dumping chemical barrels into Stepan’s open pit. All of which made compelling footage for the Coalition’s video documentary Stepan Chemical: The Poisoning of a Mexican Community.

Meetings followed between Stepan and the community, but little more. Stepan had the canal behind its property filled with dirt, as was the open pit within its gates; however, neither was excavated, allowing whatever soil contamination that was occurring to continue. Mexican officials actually closed Stepan for a few days, but in that nation such measures are widely ridiculed as political shows rather than true law enforcement. What Gonzalez really wanted was for Stepan to excavate and decontaminate the entire community, relocate the residents, and compensate them for their losses.

For Gonzalez, the cleanup of the Stepan site, and others far worse along the border, will be the true test of whether Mexico is committed to environmental stewardship or was just putting up a front for the NAFTA campaign. If, as NAFTA’s supporters claimed, the pact will produce a bounty that can help fund such cleanup efforts, Gonzalez reasons that the Stepan site should be a priority. But so far, the trade pact carries only a pledge of $2 billion to $3 billion, an amount Gonzalez says would barely make a dent in cleaning up Matamoros alone, where he estimates there may be as many as 23 industrial sites that would qualify for Superfund status in the United States.

Today Stepan officials are adamant that they will never pay damages to the community or help to relocate residents. Charles P. Riley, Jr., chief of manufacturing at Stepan’s Illinois headquarters, says the Matamoros plant complies with all Mexican laws, ships its toxic wastes to approved sites, has a new million-dollar wastewater-treatment plant, and is not now, nor ever has been, contaminating the colonia.

“It’s ironic,” Riley told me. “We’ve actually made the place much safer. I would live in the colonia and not have any worries about my health.” (No doubt the residents would be happy to make the arrangements.)

Riley says Gonzalez distorts the truth. “Apparently this is a trait of today’s reactionaries and activists,” says Riley. “He continues to say Stepan is the largest polluter in Mexico, which is ridiculous.” (Later Riley conceded that Gonzalez has only said Stepan was “one of” Mexico’s largest polluters. I asked Riley to provide any documentation of Gonzalez having made false statements. I’ve received none.)

Riley believes Stepan was a convenient target for those whose real agenda was the defeat of NAFTA. He has convinced himself that Stepan’s problems with Gonzalez will go away and the community will come to respect the company. Toward that end Stepan has donated furniture, books, and a soccer field to local schools, and has hosted an open house and a dance at the Matamoros plant.

“We had hamburgers, sodas. It was quite a nice thing,” Riley told me. “I think we’re changing minds.”

LAST CAUGHT UP WITH GONZALEZ ON A RAINY evening in San Antonio just two weeks before the NAFTA vote in the House of Representatives, the treaty’s first showdown on Capitol Hill. Without his morning coffee his eyes were still a bit reptilian as he emerged from a hotel lobby and climbed into my waiting rental car. Knowing his reputation for living on the cheap–”I learned mooching from the Farmworkers,” he laughs–I had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a free ride back to Brownsville in return for five hours of highway rumination on the life of an activist.

The previous night, after working all day in Brownsville, he had flown to the Alamo City, spoken at a local college’s snoreful NAFTA debate, and doled out sound bites to bored TV reporters. (“They’re promising the same things in NAFTA that they did 30 years ago with the maquila program.”) Then he sat up past midnight over beer and burritos with a fugitive Mexican leftist and Susan Mika, another founder of the Coalition.

Such schedules don’t seem to sap Gonzalez’s stamina, though his stout, 5-foot-6 frame now expands a bit at the middle–the result, he confesses, of too many late-night strategy sessions and not enough exercise. “Getting in at two, waking up at six, eggs and coffee–that’ll kill ya,” he says, between bites of his breakfast taco. His hair is still black as outer space and lies flat to his head; the wide cheekbones and coffee complexion come from his mother’s Indio side (His father, who speaks only Spanish, is as fair as a Spaniard.)

Gonzalez is an increasingly rare individual in self-absorbed America. Free of cynicism and driven by conscience, he has spent the last 25 years, often with great personal sacrifice, helping others fight their battles: first, in his 20s, through Catholic Church charities on the border, then Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and eventually the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), one of the largest social-service agencies in the country. In a time when many activists are one-issue supernovas or weekend zealots with nice day jobs, Gonzalez is the real thing: a full-time do-gooder.

Gonzalez no longer receives a paycheck from the Coalition, because he was uncomfortable with the appearance of being a “paid agitator.” The group pays for some of his phone bills and printing supplies, but he lives mainly off a periodic consultancy for the Texas Center for Policy Studies, an Austin-based environmental think tank. He has no savings account, no health insurance, no automobile, TV,, furniture, or credit cards. “l am,” he says wryly, “recession-proof.” Now and then friends send him checks in the mail or buy groceries; reporters on expense accounts are often good for a couple of meals each month. Divorced for some 16 years and the father of three grown sons, Gonzalez could no longer afford his apartment last year and so shuttled between the homes of his parents, former wife, a brother, and a Brownsville judge. Contacting him by phone was like trying to dial up Salman Rushdie. (He now shares an older house with several other Brownsville activists.)

One never gets the feeling that Gonzalez’s low-rent lifestyle is being put on display. He does live a simple life, but he’s no activist monk. He likes Star Trek and the Marx Brothers, even an occasional cigarette, and confesses to watching Dallas Cowboys games on the tube with his sons. “I wish I had had the money,” he tells me, “to have given my sons a better education, a better house, all the things families need, but they understand. If I ever come into money, I’d give it all back to them and my friends. They’ve made everything I do possible.”

As we head south, San Antonio’s suburban sprawl dissolves into South Texas ranch land of mesquite and prickly pear. With the NAFTA vote imminent, Gonzalez is worried. “Look at this,” he says wearily, unfolding USA Today to show a photo of Bill Clinton chatting with Henry Kissinger, below the headline: “Clinton Rolls Out NAFTA’s Big Guns.”

“I think we may have failed to make NAFTA accessible to everyone,” Gonzalez tells me. “It’s not that complicated. Are we going into the future with a corporate democracy, with public relations instead of the truth, with economics as our only consideration? That may sound idealistic, but the discussion should really be on that level.” And, he says, correctly anticipating NAFTA’s passage, “we didn’t have it.”

Much of Gonzalez’s credibility about border affairs comes from the fact that when he speaks of the Tex-Mex world, he draws on a lifetime of experience. Born in 1949, in a cluster of about a dozen small-acreage family firms 20 miles east of Brownsville, he is the second-oldest of four children– “the four who made it,” he says; six other siblings died at or shortly after birth. His family grew cotton and vegetables until the early 1960s, when dam projects on the Rio Grande reduced the flow of the river below Brownsville to a trickle and increased its salinity to the point that the farmers could no longer irrigate their crops. “The dams killed us off,” he says.

His family began following fruit and vegetable harvests in Arkansas, Michigan, and Illinois. It was not until 1964, when the family first went to California’s mammoth vineyards, Domingo recalls, that he saw the worst abuses of migrant laborers. “We lived in what we called tin cans. They were made of corrugated aluminum and were terribly hot in the summer. We put carpeting on the roofs and poured water on it, but nothing helped. If Siberia had work camps, they were not worse than these.”

One Sunday afternoon, a skinny, 15-year-old Gonzalez was hanging out in a public park in Lamont, just south of Bakers field, when he noticed a slight Chicano man striking up conversations throughout the park about workers’ rights, a minimum wage, health care– radical things there. “He just started talking to people as though they had all come to hear him,” Gonzalez remembers, still with some awe. “That was my first memory of Cesar Chavez.”

The following summer Gonzalez returned to California’s Central Valley with his family and, after work, helped college activists organize the labor camps. Gonzalez says his family benefited greatly from Chavez’s efforts, as panicked growers soon raised the hourly wage from $1.15 to $1.25 to $1.40 to discourage the emerging United Farm Workers. “We made great money in ’64, ’65, and ’66,” he recalls. “For the two-month grape harvest we were probably making $700 to $800 a week. We were not downtrodden. We bought a new pickup, came back to Brownsville, and could afford a down payment on a brick home. And we owed it all to Cesar Chavez.”

In the next ten years, Gonzalez would get married (at 19), have three sons, and drop out of college to begin his activist career. But by 1976, when he moved to an AFSC job in Philadelphia, his near-religious commitment to the cause had exacted a large price. His wife, Doris Mae, missed the border so much she returned there the next year with the three children. The marriage ended in 1978. For the next 12 years Gonzalez stayed in Philadelphia, submerged “in a siege mentality” against Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of social programs, all the while agonizing over being separated from his sons.

“I was constantly in debt,” he says. “I tried to visit them about every three months or so. I’d plan work in Texas so I could go see them.”

When does commitment to a good cause become its own kind of selfishness? I ask him. Why didn’t he take a permanent job in Texas so he could be closer to his sons?

He takes so long to respond I’m sure I’ve offended him, but it is his way to wait until the right words come. “I thought about that, the selfishness, constantly,” he finally offers. “I just couldn’t leave what I was doing. During the Reagan years we thought we were at war–those times were incredibly hard. When I would go home to Brownsville, eventually it would come time for me to leave, and my youngest son would throw himself in front of the door and scream, ‘Daddy, don’t go, Daddy, don’t go.’ It was not easy to live through those moments.”

Nearing Brownsville, the rolling ranch land flattens into a humid coastal pool table dominated by citrus, vegetable, and cotton farms. “Ah, the tragic valley,” Gonzalez announces. He’s traveled this road, what, 500 times? a thousand? but he savors the unfolding landscape like a modern pioneer.

Amid the garish casas de cambio of downtown Brownsville, a town of 60,000 that is 95-percent Latino, we slow down to see a knot of believers placing cards and photos before a tree in someone’s front yard–a tree transformed into a shrine, for the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe has been found in its bark. Raised Catholic, Gonzalez still smiles at this quaint tradition, though it’s a painful reminder of the conflicts he has in working among the border’s devoutly religious poor. While acknowledging the positive influences of the contemporary Church in Latin America, he despairs over the masses “who are convinced they’re worthless, powerless to change their environment.”

Undoing this sense of fatalism is one of the largest challenges a border activist faces, but Gonzalez draws his strength not from thinking he will transform the lives of the poor and the powerless, but from the knowledge that only in trying will he be able to deal with their misery. “There is actually very little you can do for the poor,” he says, “but what they can do for you is to re-establish your faith in the world; that no matter how bad things are, there is always happiness and always smiles.”

“The other night,” he says, trying to explain how he finds motivation, “I was in Matamoros, with a family, and the woman has three kids, beautiful kids; the oldest daughter was born with what looks like a stick for a leg, another has something wrong with her eye, and their little boy was born with a large tumor at the base of his spinal cord. His legs are dried up, he can’t walk. Three crippled kids, and yet there we were having the greatest time, laughing, telling stories. I had a British film crew with me and they were dumbfounded.

“Anyone,” he says, “who’s living a dreary middle-class existence wondering about his or her purpose in life ought to come down here and work with people who have nothing and find out what life is about.”

There–he’s let the secret out. What sustains many activists in these mythic battles against poverty and corporate neglect and environmental decay is not only altruism or the pursuit of ideology. Sometimes it is merely knowing that a good and just fight cleanses the mind and simplifies one’s own internal conflicts. Perhaps, more than anything, it is about enlightenment.

FREE TRADERS PRICETAG FOR DOMINGO GONZALEZ, PASSAGE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN

Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last year was just a setback in the long war against border pollution. The story begins in 1965, when Mexico established a tariff-free trade zone along its border with the United States. Rock-bottom wages and the Mexican government’s disregard of its own environmental laws have been luring foreign manufacturers to the region ever since. Today some 1,200 maquilas crowd the border from Texas to Tijuana.

The trade agreement extends the border free-for-all to the rest of Mexico. This time, a side agreement tries to mitigate some of the polluters’ worst excesses. But it’s a weak attempt, according to Larry Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s International Program: the ancillary accord has inadequate backing and limited bite.

For example, Mexico and the United States have promised $8 billion for border cleanup over the next decade. But that figure depends on bankers ballooning $450 million in promised seed capital into $2 billion in private lending. That may be a long shot, because even the seed money is not guaranteed. If any cash finally does flow, the Sierra Club estimates, the true cost of cleanup will total $20 billion over ten years.

And while the environmental agreement’s citizen-input process is the first ever to be included in an international trade agreement, it is made as difficult as possible. Here’s how the public would pursue relief from maquila pollution under NAFTA:

Individuals or advocacy groups from any NAFTA country can file a complaint with the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes environmental ministers from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. If the complaint meets certain “threshold determinations,” the CEC then informs the Mexican government. Mexico can halt an investigation if it determines that the facility in question is subject to a “pending proceeding,” which might simply mean that the government is seeking voluntary compliance from the polluter.

If there’s no government objection, the CEC secretariat prepares a “factual record.” It must rely solely on public records and is held to no timetable or deadline. Once the draft report is presented to the full CEC, Canada and the United States must both vote to file a complaint against Mexico. That leads to a lengthy dispute-resolution process and the unlikely possibility that sanctions would be levied against Mexico for failure to enforce its environmental laws. Mexico can avoid fines simply by claiming that it doesn’t have the money to implement those laws.

The process could drag on for 18 months; the citizens who initiated the complaint with the CEC can do nothing officially to influence its resolution. What they can do is become watchdogs, holding the NAFTA governments accountable through the glare of public attention. That, combined with the patience of a Domingo Gonzalez, might allow trade without environmental trade-offs.

Bruce Selcraig “Border patrol – environmental activist Domingo Gonzalez’s crusade against maquiladoras of Mexico – includes related information on border area pollution”. Sierra. May-June 1994. FindArticles.com. 22 Jan. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n3_v79/ai_15156659

2007 Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year: The Illegal Immigrant

He is at the heart of a great culture war in Texas – and the nation, credited with bringing us prosperity and blamed for abusing our resources. How should we deal with this stranger among us?

07:44 PM CST on Sunday, December 30, 2007

He breaks the law by his very presence. He hustles to do hard work many Americans won’t, at least not at the low wages he accepts. The American consumer economy depends on him. America as we have known it for generations may not survive him.

We can’t seem to live with him and his family, and if we can live without him, nobody’s figured out how.

He’s the Illegal Immigrant, and he’s the 2007 Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year – for better or for worse. Given the public mood, there seems to be little middle ground in debate over illegal immigrants. Spectacular fights over their presence broke out across Texas this year, adding to the national pressure cooker as only Texas can.

To their champions, illegal immigrants are decent, hardworking people who, like generations of European immigrants before them, just want to do better for their families and who contribute to America’s prosperity. They must endure hatred and abuse by those of us who want the benefits of cheap labor but not the presence of illegal immigrants.

Especially here in Texas, his strong back and willing heart help form the cornerstone of our daily lives, in ways that many of us do not, or will not, see. The illegal immigrant is the waiter serving margaritas at our restaurant table, the cook preparing our enchiladas. He works grueling hours at a meatpacking plant, carving up carcasses of cattle for our barbecue (he also picks the lettuce for our burgers). He builds our houses and cuts our grass. She cleans our homes and takes care of our children.

Yet to those who want them sent home, illegal immigrants are essentially lawbreakers who violate the nation’s borders. They use public resources – schools, hospitals – to which they aren’t entitled and expect to be served in a foreign language. They’re rapidly changing Texas neighborhoods, cities and culture, and not always for the better. Those who object get tagged as racists.

Whatever and whoever else the illegal immigrant is, everybody has felt the tidal wave of his presence. According to an analysis of government data by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, Texas’ immigrant population has jumped a whopping 32.7 percent since 2000, a period in which immigration to the United States has exceeded, in sheer numbers, all previous historical eras. Half the immigrants in the state – 7 percent of all Texans – are estimated to be here illegally.

Though many would agree that the status quo cannot be sustained – more illegal immigrants arrive each year than legal ones, a sure sign that the system is a joke – neither Texas nor the nation seemed nearer in 2007 to resolving this complex crisis. We can’t deport 12 million people who already live here, but we can’t leave our back door open indefinitely. Compromise comes hard because the issue is tangled up with the most basic aspects of everyday life, down to the core of what it means to be American.

This essay cannot put a name or a face to an illegal immigrant, because that would subject him to possible deportation. Because he lives underground, the illegal immigrant becomes, in our rancorous debate, less a complex human being and more a blank screen upon which both sides can project their hopes and fears.

If illegal immigration were an easy problem to fix, the nation wouldn’t be at an impasse. In the current atmosphere, it seems, reason doesn’t stand a chance of digging us out. Ask Irving Mayor Herb Gears, a man once denounced by anti-immigration activists for running what they called a “sanctuary city.” He then found himself targeted by Hispanics because of the city’s participation in a federal deportation program.

“One week I’m a traitor, the next week I’m a patriot,” laments Mr. Gears.

The mayor says he just wants to respect both people, and the law. His exasperated manner seems to ask, Why can’t you do both? Good question.

If there are jobs in America, Latino immigrants will come, no matter the risk. And why not? They may be at the bottom of the economic ladder here, but they’re making about four times, on average, what they could back home.

Antonio, a waiter at a North Texas restaurant, was an accountant in Mexico. He and his wife thought they could make more money in Texas, so they came illegally.

“In the time I’ve been here, this country has been very good to me. I am a responsible person. I pay my taxes. I pay my bills on time – utilities, mortgage. I pay federal taxes, too,” he says.

Antonio resented any suggestion that he should consider returning home or that illegal immigrants don’t belong here. He seemed to regard his presence here as exercising a right.

Workers like him find support among business owners – especially in Texas industries dependent on unskilled immigrants, like agriculture and construction. They say that without those workers, they couldn’t survive.

Marty owns a North Texas construction company. He has come to view American workers as undependable, lazy and arrogant, while he finds illegal immigrants motivated and reliable.

“I’d rather employ them than Americans,” he confides. “In my line of work, I need the Mexicans, and I am for them being here. I need them because I can’t find anybody else to do the work.”

(Both Antonio and Marty asked that their last names not be disclosed to prevent repercussions.)

The importance of immigrant labor to Texas was underscored this year with formation of a new political alliance – big business and the Legislature’s Mexican-American caucus. They threatened to cripple the lawmaking machinery if legislative leaders allowed a slate of “anti-immigrant” bills to advance. The tactic worked.

It’s unclear from the data whether illegal immigration is a plus or minus for the nation’s economy overall. Harvard economist George Borjas reports that it’s more or less a wash. On close inspection, Dr. Borjas, a leading expert in the field, found that immigration’s financial benefits accrue to those at the upper end of the economic scale, who can buy labor and its fruits at a lower cost, at the expense of those Americans at the lower end, whose wages go down.

“There is no such thing as a job that natives won’t do,” Dr. Borjas, an immigrant from Cuba, wrote last year. “Instead, there are jobs that natives aren’t willing to do at the going wage.”

The state comptroller’s office had a different take on Texas, reporting in 2005 that illegal immigrants provided a net economic boost of nearly $18 billion that year. While state government took in more taxes from illegal immigrants than it paid out in services for them, the comptroller said, the opposite was true for Texas’ local governments.

Nationally, a Congressional Budget Office report released this month said illegal immigrants cost more in tax dollars than they provide, especially in the areas of education, law enforcement and health. Indeed, 70 percent of babies born in Dallas’ Parkland Hospital in the first three months of 2006 were to illegal immigrant mothers. Taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars annually subsidizing births in that one hospital.

Texas schools are filling up with students classified as of limited-English proficiency, many of whose parents came here illegally. The number has reached more than 30 percent of Dallas students, 36 percent in Irving and 16 percent statewide.

Hispanic immigrants are more likely to be poor, but they don’t stay that way. The Hispanic poverty rate has dropped 30 percent since 1994, census data show. At 20.6 percent, that’s significantly above the national average of 12.8 percent. But Latinos are undeniably upwardly mobile. Besides, if you want to see what happens when Latinos leave, look at the business losses in Irving since the city’s role in the federal deportation program sent a chill through the Hispanic community.

Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Dallas, when asked what his constituents were talking about, said, “Immigration, immigration, immigration.” GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee, born again as an immigration hard-liner, told The New Yorker this month that wherever he campaigns, immigration is the first thing voters ask about. “It’s just red hot,” he says, “and I don’t fully understand it.”

John McCain does. Voters are worried, he told the magazine, that illegal immigrants make a mockery of law and the idea of sovereign borders, as well as upset social norms.

“They see this as an assault on their culture, what they view as an impact on what have been their traditions,” Mr. McCain says. “It’s become larger than just the fact that we need to enforce our borders.”

Once the GOP favorite to win the nomination, the Arizona senator set back his campaign this summer by supporting President Bush’s call for comprehensive immigration reform. A revolt at the grassroots scuttled that plan in Congress.

Democrats have felt the political whiplash, too. Hillary Clinton, for one, abandoned her support of a New York proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Most other Democratic presidential candidates fell in line with her.

The political tap dance is trickier in Texas, owing to the 1,300-mile border with Mexico and community ties across the divide. Many local officials bitterly objected to Congress’ plan to fence off long stretches of the Rio Grande. Gov. Rick Perry ultimately said “boots on the ground” and not a hard barrier was the answer to keeping out illegal immigrants. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn put forth a measure to ease up on mandatory double fencing if locals have better options.

At the local level, Farmers Branch voters this year approved a local ban on renting to illegal aliens, a move later blocked in court. Despite accusations of racism (“They are so prejudiced, but they don’t want to face it,” local business owner Elizabeth Villafranca says), and despite the judge’s order, City Council member Tim O’Hare was defiant at year’s end. Says Mr. O’Hare, “I only wish we had done this earlier.”

It’s easy to say, as many immigrant advocates do, that opposition to illegal immigration derives from racist sentiment, because that’s undeniably part of the mix. But the culture clash is a lot more complicated.

Illegal Hispanic immigrants are usually Third World peasants who have moved to the First World. They go from a country with sharp class divisions to a middle-class society.

In earlier waves of immigrants, millions of new arrivals left processing at New York’s Ellis Island with the expectation that they would adapt fully and deliberately to American norms – the melting pot, rather than the salad bowl. The post-1960s movement toward multiculturalism has made the nation more tolerant of ethnic and cultural differences, but it has also lessened the impetus for immigrants to conform.

“Mexico is radically, substantively, ferociously different from the United States,” Jorge Castañeda, formerly Mexico’s foreign minister, observed in 1995. It was a period of turmoil, with NAFTA newly inaugurated, a rural uprising in Chiapas and a growing gulf between social classes.

He described Mexicans trying to embrace an American-style work ethic, while others remained glued to a “mañana” view of life, reinforced by low pay, low self-esteem and an inability to penetrate Mexico’s rigid class system. Many Mexicans lost hope and sought a better life in America.

Rural Mexicans have dominated the migrant wave, bringing a country-style sense of time and priorities. For Americans, a transfer of Mexican rural culture to our neighborhoods leaves many feeling overwhelmed. The fear of cultural overload is manifested in sights like Spanish-language billboards or large quinceañera parties in public parks. Schoolteachers find it incomprehensible that, for some reason, immigrant students often disappear for days and suddenly return with the expectation that the teacher should catch them up.

“Certain Mexicans can subscribe to a series of rules, from traffic regulations to work discipline and punctuality; others can decide, consciously or otherwise, that they prefer not to,” Dr. Castañeda wrote.

Illegal immigration exacerbates the natural tension in American society by injecting more change than can be absorbed – and by defying laws designed to control the rate of change. When immigration restrictionists protest defiance of “law and order,” they reveal anger at the cultural revolution Latino immigrants bring – a revolution many U.S. citizens feel powerless to stop.

Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, one of America’s most eminent political scientists – and a liberal one – has argued that the immigration wave stands as “the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity.”

In his 2004 book Who Are We?, Dr. Huntington identified several factors that set current Hispanic immigration apart from previous episodes in U.S. history.

Most immigrants are Latino and come over a border, not an ocean. Roughly half of these are illegal. Assimilation is slower, writes Dr. Huntington, because the immigrants “remain in intimate contact with their families, friends and home localities in Mexico as no other immigrants have been able to do.”

The scale is unmatched, he argues. Since 2000, more immigrants (10.3 million) have arrived in America than in any other seven-year period, according to the Center for Immigration Studies’ recent analysis of census data. And in contrast to previous waves of immigration, this one shows no signs of letting up, according to Dr. Huntington.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Some of Dr. Huntington’s critics point out that the rate of immigration (as distinct from sheer numbers) is not as high now as in previous eras, which ended with successful assimilation of foreign-born populations. Besides, though the current immigration flow shows no signs of abating, the Mexican GDP is growing and the national fertility rate has plummeted by almost two-thirds since 1970. That birth rate is nearing the level at which Mexico would need to retain workers for its own economy, thereby shutting off the spigot of immigration into the U.S.

As for assimilation, Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, points to social-science data indicating that Hispanic immigrants are, in fact, assimilating as fast as immigrants of previous generations. They learn English quickly, and, once they acquire proficiency, they adopt American cultural attitudes.

One other observation of Dr. Huntington’s has particular resonance in Texas: The current wave of immigrants has had disproportionate impact on the Southwest. And as the majority of them are from Mexico, they are now settled in areas that used to belong to their ancestors.

Attempts to draw a sharp line between mainstream “Anglo” (for lack of a better term) culture and Hispanic culture is a distortion of the reality we live with in much of Texas, and always have. The border between the two Texan cultures is as porous as the border between Texas and Mexico, which is one reason why our experience with immigration differs from much of America’s.

Texas culture reflects the long list of towns with Spanish names. What’s more, in a great swath along the border, most cities are run by those with Spanish surnames, too. Today’s immigration wave has carried a different version of Hispanic culture to Dallas and other major population centers. And in this increasingly urbanized state, the dominant Anglo culture has felt a rub like never before.

Though towns and cities nationwide have felt the rub, too, it hasn’t been on the Texas scale. Leaders in Farmers Branch and Irving were reacting to complaints of runaway community transformation brought on by illegal arrivals.

As 2007 began, the isolated Texas Panhandle town of Cactus was still reeling from the arrests of nearly 300 people at the local Swift & Co. meat-processing plant, the community’s economic lifeblood. Dozens of Mexicans and Guatemalans were prosecuted this year for using stolen Social Security numbers to work at the plant.

The town had come to resemble a kind of renegade outpost of illegal immigrants that wouldn’t exist in non-border states.

Everything’s bigger in Texas, and history and geography guarantee that the immigration problem is no different. And many issues are flaring sooner here. What Cactus, Irving and Farmers Branch are dealing with today, the rest of America may be dealing with tomorrow. Texas, which will be majority Hispanic by 2020, and the nation face an unprecedented challenge that we can’t dismiss with gauzy platitudes, nor defer meeting indefinitely.

How Texas – and, by extension, the rest of America – reacts will be unlike how previous generations handled immigration, given how the nation has changed since the 1960s. Fair or not, core American culture and values have become a popular punching bag. Some have cheered that as refining the American character by embracing diversity, inclusiveness and empowerment of ethnic and other minorities. Others worry that America risks losing itself in the process, especially if it gives up on securing the borders.

Historians say that the distinctly American democratic and middle-class ideals grew out of a specific cultural tradition – the Anglo-Protestant. Changed slowly over time by immigrants from the world over, it’s now challenged by a strong competing culture.

If critics are correct, we could be seeing the advent of the kind of fractiousness that bedevils public life in Canada and other nations where peoples who speak different languages, and come from different cultural backgrounds, live together only with mutual suspicion and unease.

On the other hand, perhaps the alarmists are wrong. Maybe these ambitious, hard-working immigrants, whatever their documentation, will write the next great chapter of a story that’s still deeply American, though with a different accent. If the optimists are right, much work remains to be done to incorporate all immigrants fully into new cultural traditions.

We end 2007 no closer to compromise on the issue than when the year began. People waging a culture war – and that’s what the struggle over illegal immigration is – don’t give up easily. What you think of the illegal immigrant says a lot about what you think of America, and what vision of her you are willing to defend. How we deal with the stranger among us says not only who we Americans are today but determines who we will become tomorrow.

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