Editor’s note: If you Google “North American Union” you will find more conspiracy theories from the Right fearing loss of US sovereignty than you will visionary articles from the Left about how the people’s of North America could create people-friendly solutions to our major economic and immigration problems. So we were delighted to receive this from Josh Healey.

by Josh Healey

The federal judge who blocked the worst provisions of Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law one day before they were to take effect didn’t do so on the basis of its violations of civil rights. No, Judge Susan Bolton ruled that portions of SB1070, including the mandate that local law enforcement check the papers of anyone they ‘suspect’ is undocumented, were unconstitutional because they “intruded into federal authority.” The legislation, even in its watered down version, is still the harshest anti-immigrant law in decades and represents the legalization of xenophobia against Latinos and anyone with brown skin. While grassroots activists fight the morality and legality of SB1070, the law’s proponents like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, claim it is necessary because the “federal government has failed to act.” Though I hate to admit it because I’m out in the streets protesting her every week, the truth is: she’s right.

Congress and numerous presidents, including President Obama, have ignored and often exacerbated the root causes of immigration. Federal lawmakers focus on short-term, knee-jerk proposals: a new guest worker policy here, a taller wall outside Tijuana there. With little national leadership, legislators at the state level have taken the issue up on their own in increasingly reactionary ways. Arizona is only the most extreme version of this vigilante version of immigration policy.

And it’s not over. Massive unemployment, a disastrous drug war, and 40 years of conservative ideology dominating American discourse have all created a backdrop for the current attacks on immigrants. So while thousands of immigrants and progressive activists across the country have protested SB1070 and called for a boycott of Arizona, conservative lawmakers in other states have drafted legislation modeled after the controversial new law.

One such state that recently proposed its own apartheid-lite law is Minnesota. You read that right: Minnesota! That’s the other border. Now, I lived right next door to Minnesota for six years in the great state of Wisconsin, and I can tell you from experience: just like Sarah Palin could “see Russia” from her home in Alaska, the governor of Minnesota can make out Canada in the distance. So is that what’s pushing Minnesota to pass such an anti-immigrant law? A fear of undocumented Canadians?

The Root Causes of Migration

In reality, the nativist anger is geared towards America’s southern neighbors, in particular Mexico. Despite having the longest shared border in the world, the U.S. and Canada have never had an “immigration problem.” Both wealthy nations and peaceful neighbors, they have never had a major flow either way of migrants fleeing war or poverty. What’s more, there is a shared dominant culture of music, ideas, and sports — even as I type this, Drake, the Toronto-born hip-hop star of the moment, is playing on my iTunes. So the northern border is relatively open and accessible: American visitors to Glacier National Park in Montana can get a day pass to Canada’s Banff National Park just across the border quick and easy. Despite the imaginary line running through it, it is, after all, the same park.

The U.S./Mexico border (not to mention the waters between Florida and the islands of the Caribbean), on the other hand, is a very different story. The Rio Grande is not just the great river but the great divider — between desperation and opportunity, between Mexican poverty and American wealth (or at least the illusion of American wealth). This wealth didn’t just materialize from the heavens, either: much of it was pillaged through U.S. military invasions and CIA-backed wars throughout the Western Hemisphere: Mexico (1848), Dominican Republic (1916-1924, and again in 1965-66), El Salvador (1981-1992), and over a dozen other countries in Latin America. In recent years, U.S. policy in the region has steered away from direct military intervention (that’s what the Middle East is for) and towards the economic domination of neoliberalism. Enter the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Let’s be clear: NAFTA is currently the single greatest cause of migration to the United States. NAFTA, which eliminated most trade and investment barriers between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, was pitched to the peoples of all three nations as an instrument to improve the economic fortunes of all the parties involved. Instead, the agreement (like others the U.S. has signed with countries in the Global South over the last two decades) has been a bonanza for corporations and a disaster for everyone else. With no more tariffs, U.S.-subsidized corn flooded Mexico with impossibly cheap prices, destroying the livelihood of over two million Mexican farmers, many of whom have since migrated to the States. At the same time, thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs were outsourced to cheaper labor in Mexico (many to be later moved to China), creating hostility from downsized U.S.-born workers to their newly arrived immigrant counterparts. The basic principle of NAFTA is that capital can cross borders — but people cannot. Yet it is NAFTA itself, and this convergence of neoliberal forces, that has led to the current crisis: militarized borders and Minutemen, coyotes and deaths in the desert, drug wars and mass graves in Ciudad Juarez — and now Arizona.

The immigrant rights movement in the U.S. is fighting the good fight, and I am proud to be part of the struggle: for labor rights and a path to citizenship, against Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) raids and the racial profiling mandated by the Arizona law. But the good fight is not necessarily the big fight. Arizona is a symptom of our irrational immigration system, not the disease. To heal the wounds of mass migration, we need to address its underlying neoliberal causes. So let’s start with a radical, practical proposal: scrap NAFTA and replace it with a North American Union (NAU) that would transform the lives of working people on both sides of the border, ending the need for any walls to divide us.

What a North American Union would Look Like

Bringing together the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and (unlike NAFTA) the nations of Central America, the North American Union would be a new vision for international prosperity, one created on the basis of shared economic justice and human rights. If the symbol of NAFTA is the wall at the border, then the NAU would look like a bridge: a bridge between peoples and cultures that, unlike NAFTA, would go both ways. A true union, the NAU would be founded on the principles of solidarity, democratic rights, and the universal love of the burrito.

“But we can’t make a union with a country like Mexico!,” I can already hear Rush Limbaugh object. “We’d all become janitors and deal drugs and – God forbid – play soccer.” While right-wing cries of the U.S. being “dragged into the Third World” are attempts to play on people’s fears, it is true that the North American continent encompasses vastly stratified economies. Rather than ignore those inequalities, the NAU would address them head on. It would not begin with full integration, but would be a graduated process — similar to its major international predecessor, the European Union (EU).

The EU was formally established in its current form in 1993, but actually began almost four decades earlier in 1957 with the formation of the European Economic Community. The original community was only six countries in Western Europe: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Over time, the union grew to include Great Britain and Austria, but the major turning point was in the 1980s, when it brought in poorer countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece, recently emerging from dictatorships and with struggling economies. The EU ensured (both before and during the early years of the their accession to the union) that these countries would be able to make political and economic improvements that allowed them to be full partners in the union.

Thus, the NAU would begin not with erasing borders on a map, but with massive social investment in Mexico and Central America. It would require the U.S. and Canada to devote resources to education, jobs, and infrastructure in those countries — in essence, a localized version of the Global Marshall Plan put forward by Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. The NAU would also necessitate higher standards and the integration of environmental, labor, and human rights laws. Again, this could be modeled after the EU’s “Copenhagen criteria,” which mandate new members to maintain a stable democracy that respects human rights and the rule of law. This “grassroots globalization” would replace the race to the bottom that NAFTA embodies. And it’s needed for more than just Mexico. Here in the U.S. — between coal miners losing their lives, oil spills in the Gulf, and every presidential electoral fiasco of the last decade (Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, etc.) — we could use some stronger regulation ourselves.

In the longer term, the NAU would lay the foundation for a common currency and more cooperative economic policies. It could include a North American Parliament to coordinate social and environmental policy. Each country would get a fair proportion of seats, and there would be no veto power like the kind the U.S. holds in the UN Security Council. The EU has struggled to keep its public bodies accountable to the public, so the NAU would have to be very clear in terms of lobbying and limiting corporate influence. In the end, though, such international integration is possible, and indeed preferable to past and current crises. The best part? The NAU would eventually lead to a common passport and – you guessed it – open borders. Yes, open borders. Between San Diego and Tijuana, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. You would still need a permit to work or study, just like you do from Poland to Italy — but that’d be a clear, simple, and ICE-free process.

The Beautiful Byproducts of Integration

Raising the level of economic justice and human rights across the continent would lead to less people being forced to leave their homes in search of survival and opportunity. Thus, the NAU would actually decrease migration, not increase it. (Let me make clear, I’m not against immigration. I’m all for people being able to travel and live where they want, but it should be a choice, not a necessity.) The union would meet the pressing goals of the immigrant rights movement, such as family reunification and an end to raids. But beyond the immediate reforms, the NAU would represent a fundamental shift in US foreign and domestic policy. It would change how the US sees itself in relation to its neighbors, and the world: we are not “America,” but part of the Americas.

Rather than the US treating Latin America like its imperial backyard, we would be shared caretakers of our Western Hemispheric neighborhood. The most positive result of the NAU thus would be an end to U.S. military intervention in Latin America. Ever since they joined the EU, you haven’t seen France invade Spain, or Britain send soldiers to squash the current crisis in Greece. (Some would argue that Britain doesn’t need to send troops anymore; it sends bankers.) Once you’re in a union, there is a common brotherhood and recognition of humanity that doesn’t allow for such aggression. It’s why New Yorkers doesn’t attack people from Boston — at least outside the context of a Yankees-Red Sox game.

So what would a North American Union mean? Well, it would mean no more School of the Americas, where the US trains brutal Latin American generals and dictators. No more CIA assassinations. It would mean no more banana republics, where US corporations run small countries at will. No misplaced drug war. And it would mean no more demonization of Latino immigrants in the U.S. If the states are friendly, then the people will be too. The NAU would start with Mexico and Central America, and then could expand to the Caribbean (after all, who needs and deserves such a shift more than Haiti?), then all of the Americas. Imagine: a true union from Alaska to Argentina. Obviously, US foreign policy and immigration politics encompass more than Latin America, but we have to start somewhere. And what better place than close to home? The key is this: we can only create the NAU if all the countries, and their peoples, want to. Which leads to the most important question, particularly in the U.S.: how the hell do we get there?

Globalization from Below

The North American Union will only happen, and can only succeed, if it comes from the grassroots. If it emerges from above, in the boardrooms of multinational CEO’s and their Congressional deputies, it will be dictated and ruled from above. But if it comes from below, NAU policies will reflect societal needs instead of corporate interests. Perhaps more important, the union will be in people’s hearts and not just on a piece of paper. A birth certificate is not what tells me my older brother is my family. It’s that even though I don’t see him as much as I wished, I know that he will always love me and have my back — and I will for him. So too can it be for Oakland and San Salvador, Houston and Port au Prince: brothers and sisters of the Americas.

The people of Latin America are already leading the way. Strong, courageous social movements – millions of people strong – in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador have pushed back decades of neoliberalism and recently elected left/liberal governments of varying shades. And unlike liberal groups here in the States, they continue to pressure and challenge those governments. Some of these countries, led by Venezuela, have formed their own integrationist project, called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (known as ALBA, by its Spanish acronym), and are in the process of developing a regional currency, the Sucre. Such prospects are exciting, and remind us that we should look (with a critical lens) as much to Caracas as much as to Brussels for models.

As much as they might want to, though, the Latin American Left can’t do it without us. At the 2005 World Social Forum, the biannual global gathering of social movements begun in Brazil, their message to U.S. activists was clear: “We can’t fully change our countries, until you get your country off our back.” This was the impetus for the U.S. Social Forum (USSF), first held in 2007 and most recently this June in Detroit, which I attended with over 20,000 activists. The USSF reflected international solidarity while acknowledging our role in the heart of imperialism, including in their modification of the social forum slogan: “Another World is Possible — Another U.S. is Necessary.” Eduardo Galeano couldn’t have put it better himself.

So to my brothers and sisters of the immigrant rights movement, I say yes, we need to boycott Arizona and fight all laws entailing racial profiling. Yes, we need to push for immediate reforms like amnesty and an end to deportations. But we also need to start publicly declaring what we are for, not just what we are against. We can start this push at the grassroots level: amongst unions, environmentalists, students, immigrant advocates, and small businesses. As we build power across borders, we must go about the beautiful, messy process of local and national organizing here within the U.S. as well. We have to put pressure on Congress and especially President Obama.

If there’s a president with the potential for a vision of great transformation like the NAU, it’s Obama. Since his campaign, however, he’s acted on very few progressive visions — and we have yet to really hold his feet to the fire. Let’s start now: call for President Obama to make just immigration reform and a NAU his first initiative after the November mid-term elections. We will start with this simple phrase, a North American Union, and we will make it a rallying cry for a Western Hemisphere with justice — and without borders.

Josh Healey is a writer, an organizer, and the author of Hammertime: Poems and Possibilities. Featured by the New York Times, NPR, and Al-Jazeera, he lives in Oakland, California, and works with Youth Speaks to empower young artists and activists. He has written for Tikkun about Justice in Jerusalem and Invincible, the Detroit hip-hop emcee.