LOOKOUT by Naomi Klein

The Rise of the Fortress Continent by Naomi Klein 
 
This article can be found on the web at
www.thenation.com

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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.