With other protocols like the DMCA and security
mesaures, this is a dark outlook for resistance and
collaborative efforts by people from the "inside" and
those "outside"…
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i 030203&s=klein
lookout by Naomi Klein
The Rise of the Fortress Continent
[from the February 3, 2003 issue]
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 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.
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."
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 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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The Rise of the Fortress Continent, Naomi Klein
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