America’s addiction

As part of a crackdown on corruption and crime, Mexico’s new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has revamped the national fuel distribution system to deter petrol theft - a move that has resulted in temporary shortages across various Mexican states. The United States media have turned up to highlight the real takeaway: the shortages may affect the transport of Mexican avocados and the availability of guacamole for the annual massively hyped, televised sporting event known as the Super Bowl to be held this year on February 3.

A recent Reuters headline blared: “Holy guacamole! Mexican fuel shortage threatens Super Bowl snack”. Other outlets followed suit. CNN warned that “Super Bowl guac may be off the table if gas shortage sidelines Mexican avocados”, Maxim magazine foretold a ‘major guacamole crisis’, and the Eater website took the (foot)ball and ran with it: “Cue the guacpocalypse”.

In short, while the avocado dip may be in short supply, the cheesiness definitely isn’t. And speaking of cheesy, concerned Super Bowl viewers are reminded that at least there’s always queso - that staple dish of Texas that often involves ‘cheese’ that is not actually cheese.

While Americans fret over the loss of a favourite snack food, US President Donald Trump, of course, has his own border-related obsessions - and is forging ahead with his campaign to erect a bigger and better wall on the US-Mexico frontier. According to Trumpian analysis, the latter nation is primarily composed of drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. To be sure, there’s nothing like a good migrant scapegoat to detract public attention from elite pillaging of the country and other unpleasantries.

But it’s not so simple, as it seems that – aside from guacamole cravings – there are other, much stronger forms of cross-border dependence at play. As a January Washington Post article noted: “A wall can’t solve America’s addiction to undocumented immigration”. The author, Julia G Young, traces the past century of addiction, observing that, although “politicians and media have consistently cast undocumented immigration as a national security crisis … the demand for undocumented immigrant labor - and consumers’ demand for the low prices that this labor makes possible - have continued apace”.

And a January item on the CBS News website - courtesy of Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Programme at Cornell University - lists some of the US industries that “can’t work without illegal immigrants”. For example, she writes, the US Department of Agriculture has calculated “that about half of the nation’s farmworkers are unauthorised”. It’s no secret that undocumented workers often perform jobs that Americans won’t do - including ones entailing substantial physical risk. They generally work for less pay and no benefits, hence the appeal to profit-driven businesses.

US consumers, though perhaps unwittingly, are also addicted to the exploitative system; Dudley brings up a dairy industry study indicating that a “total elimination of immigrant labor would increase milk prices by 90 percent”. No doubt many Americans would find such prospects considerably more frightening than the potential guacpocalypse.

Additional food for thought comes in the form of a November PBS intervention,titled “4 myths about how immigrants affect the US economy”, which undertakes to replace Trump’s tall tales with such facts as that “immigrants contribute more in tax revenue than they take in government benefits”.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘The guacamole famine, the Super Bowl, and other American dramas’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com