HOW HE SEES IT A just strategy to stem tide of illegals

By ROBERT STEINBACK
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
AGUA PRIETA, Sonora, Mexico -- A small group of U.S. humanitarian-entrepreneurs have managed to do with $20,000 what critics say a $2 billion wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will not: encourage Mexicans to stay home.
The Just Trade Center, based in Douglas, Ariz., just across the border from this sprawling city, used a $20,000 loan to help 30 Mexican coffee growers set up Cafe Justo (Just Coffee), a cooperative venture to harvest, roast, package and deliver their own crop to America's booming java market. By cutting out profiteering middlemen, the growers have quadrupled their income.
All that did was inject a new current of prosperity to the cooperative's home base in Salvador Urbina in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas -- diminishing the incentive for impoverished Mexicans to seek a livelihood elsewhere.
"We've seen here on the border where $20,000 invested in the hopes of the community has done more than billions of dollars building fences," said Mark Adams, who heads a binational ministry in Douglas and Agua Prieta called Frontera de Cristo. "I know of 30 families who don't have a need to migrate. The children are going back to their communities because there is economic opportunity."
Quality-of-life imbalance
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 current crisis over illegal immigration obscures this premise. The Just Trade Center is proving in a small way that even a little prosperity can be enough to keep people at home.
"With Cafe Justo we can sell our product directly to clients and receive a just price," said Daniel Cifuentes, who grew up in Chiapas and now heads the cooperative's small coffee roasting operation in Agua Prieta. In Chiapas, he said, "We can see a change in the lives of the people."
Adams learned from Cifuentes and other growers that Chiapas farmers were being paid about 35 cents a pound for their coffee.
"Mark told them, in the U.S., you can pay $3 for a cup of coffee. How could this be?" said Tommy Bassett III, who helped set up the Just Trade Center. Bassett convinced a Presbyterian micro-lending enterprise to extend a $20,000 loan to help the farmers market their own coffee. They bought an $11,000 coffee roaster, which was set up in Cifuentes' home. Bassett then traveled to Chiapas and convinced several growers he'd pay $130 for the same 92-pound sack of coffee beans they had been selling to coffee brokers for about $32 if they'd trust him to buy part of the crop on credit. They became believers when the first payment arrived.
I asked Cifuentes if the coffee brokers, called "coyotes," were upset about being cut out of the deal.
"It's not a problem for them. Cafe Justo (represents) a small part of the production of Chiapas," he told me. "Possibly in the future we will have a problem, but today, no."
The center hopes Just Coffee will be fully Mexican run within five years. Meanwhile, Bassett is setting up two more coffee cooperatives, and wants to replicate the model for tea and cashew growers.
I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but I actually liked Just Coffee's Arabica and Robusto blends. Visit Just Coffee's Web site at www.justcoffee.org.
Cheap labor
So let's see: Congress is prepared to waste $2 billion of our taxes on a 700-mile, 30-foot wall -- some observers say it will cost twice that -- across the Southwest desert, as if this is going to stop American businesses from finding other ways to import the cheap labor they so covet. We spend additional billions for the U.S. Border Patrol to interdict hundreds of people a day, just to return them across the border or imprison them, again at taxpayers' expense -- and now we're going to send the National Guard -- all to keep immigrants from filling jobs Americans allegedly don't want anyway.
Or, for far greater impact per dollar and the promise of a return on investment, we could implement a logical long-term strategy to help increase the standard of living south of the border, each step of progress serving to mitigate the incentive for people to sneak into the United States. Free trade can't accomplish this unless it is also fair trade -- trade that benefits everyone in the process, not just those in the corporate boardroom. Just Coffee carries the apt subtitle, "Caffeine with a Conscience." If our nation's immigration policy is ever going to work, it will have to develop a conscience of its own.
X Robert Steinback is a former columnist for The Miami Herald, now on a one-year sabbatical. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.