The Mexican-US Relationship, The True Scourge of Mexicans

ByMarat Barca

This article by Marat Barca originally appeared in the November 11, 2025 edition of Rebelión.

Latin America, as we know it today, owes its essential characteristics to the impact of the European conquest beginning in the 16th century. This event represented a crucial phenomenon: on the one hand, it was a necessary complement to the birth and development of European capitalism, without which its consolidation is difficult to imagine; on the other hand, for our continent, it meant a type of subjugation that some authors have described as extractive, that is, a plundering of natural resources for the global market.

Among the various explanatory perspectives, there is a consensus that the historical underdevelopment of Latin American countries has been and continues to be a consequence of the dependency imposed by developed nations. Below, I briefly describe the postulates that explain the mechanisms currently operating to maintain and deepen this inequality, as applied to the Mexico-United States relationship.

The center of power has shifted across several countries. Since World War II, the center of domination has moved from Europe to the United States, under new forms of control. The argument, whose validity is currently supported by evidence, was established by the scholar Samir Amin (1931-2018) in his work written from the 1970s onward and further developed in subsequent years. Based on debates surrounding unequal exchange between countries, his arguments maintained that the primary driver of value transfers from the periphery to the imperial core was not productivity differences, but rather global wage disparities.

Samir Amin

Samir Amin argued that unequal exchange in monopoly capitalism arose from the interaction of advanced capitalist methods with low-wage labor in dependent economies, transforming the periphery into an exporter of products supplied by modern, highly productive capitalist corporations. In other words, he contended that global wage disparities are a crucial mechanism in the consolidation of monopolies and imperialism within the global capitalist system.

This proposal has been supported by Jason Hickel, who, along with other researchers, published an article in 2024 demonstrating that the economies of the Global North appropriated a net 906 billion hours of embodied labor from the Global South. The study showed that, despite contributing 90 percent of global labor, workers in peripheral economies receive only 21 percent of global income.

Mexican researcher Mateo Crossa, along with Álvaro de Regil, studied the center-periphery relationship effects in the specific case of the Mexico-United States relationship, yielding the following results: in 2007, workers in the export manufacturing sector earned $2.56 per hour, while, according to the principle of equal pay for equal work, they should have earned $22.30 per hour. This unpaid labor led to a loss of value of $66 billion.

By 2023, the situation had worsened dramatically: a worker in the sector earned $4.45 per hour, a significant increase from 2007, although they should have received $26.65 per hour under the same principle. This extraction of corporate value amounted to $22.20 per hour. Multiplied by the number of workers in the export manufacturing sector and by the number of hours worked (INEGI, 2023), the resulting loss of value due to labor arbitrariness totaled $135 billion. This is the value appropriated by monopoly capital from nearly three million workers in Mexico’s export manufacturing industry.

The figure reported above is of a magnitude that, when compared with other records, allows us to better appreciate its significance. For example, the amount Mexico receives in remittances in a year, $63 billion compared to the $135 billion mentioned above, does not represent half of the surplus transferred from Mexico to the United States through wage disparities in the export manufacturing sector. Furthermore, if we compare it to the total resources allocated to social programs, $28 billion earmarked for 2023, it represents only a tiny fraction of the aforementioned wage disparity.

The arguments presented by Crossa and de Regil are crucial for understanding and identifying the core problems facing our country, and for preventing us from being blinded by the federal government’s claim that we will succeed simply by redistributing social programs. I agree that the current situation reflects the global class struggle, which manifests itself in various ways and has diverse effects. This situation deprives workers of the full value of their labor and redistributes wealth only upwards, harming not only Mexican workers but also countries like Mexico that transfer capital to the Global North, thus perpetuating the cycle of dependency and underdevelopment.