Last month, I gave a presentation called “How You Can Change the World with Your Morning Cup of Coffee.” at Cal State Fullerton’s Social Justice Summit.

An overly sensational title? I think not. Fair trade coffee really has much bigger ramifications than its soundbyte description: “fair prices to farmers.”

But first — back to the Summit. Held just a few days before the May 1 demonstrations, immigration was on everyone’s mind, including mine.

Immigration’s relation to coffee? Well, the coffee crisis itself is causing a lot of the immigration. Many of immigrants are coffee farmers who’ve either lost or abandoned their land due to the coffee crisis.

According to a 2002 MSNBC article, “many workers are abandoning their villages to look for a better life in Mexico’s cities and in the United States. Half the 14 undocumented Mexican migrants who died in May 2001 trying to cross Arizona’s brutal desert together after their guide abandoned them were coffee workers from Veracruz state.” (via Two Heroes). Writes Gregory Dicum for SF Gate: “They had been trying to cross the border in hopes of a better life as illegal laborers in a country where coffee sold for 20 times what they could have earned for it on the farm.”

The poverty on these farms is often a effect of our corporations, our trade policies. Writes David Kennedy, after a Global Exchange Reality Tour to Chiapas, Mexico last July: “Officially, government statistics say migration to the U.S. from Mexico has, at the very least, tripled in the last decade… Could it be just a coincidence this has occurred since NAFTA was enacted? The root causes of migration, mainly failed policies promoted by NAFTA and the structure of the economic system, create the economic destitution that generates, predictably, mass departure…” (via Fair Trade Coffee News)

What I said at the Summit was that I support progressive immigration laws — I’m an immigrant myself. But I’m against policies and structures that effectively make immigration the ONLY option for people made destitute by those policies and structures.

Many argue that today’s immigrants would rather stay on their land, given the choice. Writes Robert Steinback in the Arizona Daily Star: “I operate from the premise that nobody really wants to leave home; they only migrate when the quality-of-life imbalance between home and another location is so great that the home-bias attraction is overcome. The crisis over illegal immigration obscures this premise.”

So what can fair trade coffee do? It gives coffee farmers fair prices for their coffee, letting them stay on the land. Steinback profiles one fair trade co-op, Just Coffee in Chiapas — where fair trade is “diminishing the incentive for impoverished Mexicans to seek a livelihood elsewhere,” much more effectively than a $2 billion wall and a beefed up US Border Patrol.

Writes David Kennedy, “To “secure” borders, the incredible wealth disparity between (and within) rich and poor nations must be narrowed. If we are to truly address immigration, we can not allow human beings to live in economic misery and exploitation, at best, and economic slavery at worst.”

Wanna go beyond changing your morning dose of caffeine to fair trade? Go to Global Exchange to find out more about the global economy and what you can do to influence it.

Update, 6/1/06: A timely article from Yes!: “If we fail to recognize the connections between migration and globalization, our policies will provide a temporary Band-Aid solution at best. And yet U.S. politicians have not only failed to recognize these global links, they have also scapegoated immigrants for domestic policy failures.”

Tags: fairtrade, coffee, immigration

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