The Clinton administration is overseeing the biggest military buildup on the U.S.-Mexico border in modern history. Touted as a move to cut migration, in fact these are nothing more than an election year ploy. Meanwhile, far more effective measures to reduce the pressures accelerating global migration have been proposed by the International Labour Organization and the UN High Commission on Refugees. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on issues of labor and immigration.

For all its talk of valuing immigrants, the Clinton administration is presiding over the largest militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border in modern history. In mid-January it announced it was sending 350 regular U.S. troops to patrol the border for the first time. An additional 200 Border Patrol agents, 60 special agents and 40 inspectors will join them just on the California stretch of the border alone. Another 135 police and sheriffs will back them up, along with National Guard contingents already there.

Who's the enemy? According to Attorney General Janet Reno, the enemy is the workers who, after putting in a year's labor in the U.S., went back to see their families for Christmas. To make the enemy appear more dangerous, officials talk of the growing influx of drugs being smuggled from Mexico into the U.S.

Reno calls this smart, aggressive and effective policy. In fact, it's an election year strategy aimed at soothing people's fears of losing their jobs in an economy out of their control. It will have no more impact on cutting immigration than NAFTA did.

Three years ago, Clinton promised that relaxing restrictions on the flow of goods and money across the border would reduce immigration from Mexico. His pro-NAFTA stance was endorsed by Republican politicians and corporate boardrooms alike. Now that NAFTA has boomeranged, forcing even higher numbers of Mexicans to seek survival by going north, these same voices are calling for increased border enforcement -- along with cutting SSI payments for elderly immigrants, and denial of workplace rights of immigrants once they reach the U.S.

Such draconian measures will fail because they don't recognize mass human migration for what it is -- a new fact of life in an increasingly global economic system. According to the U.N., over 100 million people across the globe have left their countries of origin to live as immigrants elsewhere. The greatest number, 20 million, live in Europe; Africa ranks second with 16 to 20 million; North America ranks third with 15 to 17 million.

These numbers have increased even as governments and financial institutions have deregulated the flow of goods and capital across borders from Europe to North America. While Japan and the countries of the eastern Pacific plan similar measures, poor countries seek to attract investment from rich ones by reducing wage levels, subsidizing the infrastructure foreign factories want, and cutting taxes and environmental restrictions. For corporations and institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, borders hardly exist.

In developing countries, the IMF and World Bank impose austerity programs as the price for loans. When wages go down, unemployment rises, or prices for crops tumble, conditions may improve for investment, but people leave their homes and seek survival elsewhere.

President Clinton wants troops on the border to reduce migration, California Governor Pete Wilson wants migrants barred from schools and hospitals. The difference is only one of degree. Both argue that the movement of money can't be stopped but people must be.

In fact, under present circumstances, the movement of peoples is unstoppable. But last year the International Labor Organization and the UN High Commission on Refugees proposed much more realistic measures to reduce people's desire to leave their homelands. The measures call for increasing opportunities for legal immigration as a way to cut illegal immigration; supplying immigrants with realistic information about conditions in destination countries; and creating programs to support migrants who want to return home voluntarily. Rather than militarizing borders, both organizations point out that in relaxed border areas, people often prefer to live in one country and work in another, crossing the border every day.

The most important step to alleviate the pressures that accelerate migration, especially in industrialized countries, is protecting the rights of immigrants themselves. Four years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. It extends basic human rights without distinction to all migrants, documented or undocumented.

The Convention supports the right of family re-unification, establishes the principle of equality of treatment with citizens of the host country in relation to employment and education, protects migrants against collective deportation, and makes both sending and receiving countries responsible for protecting these rights. All countries retain the right to determine who is admitted to their territories, and under what conditions people gain the right to work.

Predictably, countries which send immigrants favor the Convention, and countries which receive them do not. The U.S. has not ratified it. The Convention recognizes the new global scale of the migration of peoples and its permanence.

Coming to terms with that reality in the middle of a U.S. presidential campaign is not easy. But the price for failing to recognize it will be high. After the election, we will find ourselves having to live with increasing economic inequality and racial paranoia, and a border with Mexico which feels like Bosnia.