There is a wonderful little discussion from Freakonomics on the prospect of a North American Union. Tada! It’s an hour long but worth the listen.

Sadly it starts with the comically hackish host of Mad Money, Jim Kramer. If you want to know how I feel about him, look to John Stewart. On occasion I just defer to his opinion. His segment is parsed in purely capitalistic terms, and discussed as a form of corporate merger. As profoundly dehumanizing as that is, he did aptly make the case for an American merger with Mexico.

In his erring, he raised a highly interesting issue: the demographics of Canada are much as America in that we are old, whereas Mexico is young. As such there is some good things to be gained for the workforce from the perspective of traditional capital. An influx of young workers from Mexico would have a generally suppressing tendency of wages across the continent, but could fill a gap that will only widen as boomers retire from the work force.

This downward pressure on wages would be truly disastrous for the middle class; the minimum wage is already at a sluggish rate of growth, and median income for Canadians has stagnated over the past 30 years. A massive influx of labor would only further tilt the market in the favor of capital.

At first blush the argument seems completely and totally unpalatable. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to reconsider.

Consider for a moment if you will the vector of conflict ongoing in Europe concerning the movement of labor, and in particular, the English objection to it. Merkel had to lecture Cameron on his proposed objections to freedom of movement within the EU. In essence, Cameron wanted for the UK, or states generally, to have control over inter-EU immigration, while maintaining capital investment rules. Under such a scheme the EU would recede from a common community, and become more of an economic union as was created by NAFTA.

In such a scheme we have a system devoted to favoring capital over labor, giving wealthy individuals full rights of movement and investment into poorer regions of the union for exploitative means, without offering citizens of those poorer union the freedom to gain a better life in more stable and wealthy regions. It is a structural advantage that dehumanizes labor, fundamentally pitting poor and wealthy workers against each other.

That appalling schisms of power favoring wealth is in fact the order of the day for Canada and Mexico. Super-wealthy Canadian companies, generally in the mineral extraction business, can set up shop in Mexico where they pollute pollute the environment, propagate corruption, and exacerbate inequality. Mexican workers are then left to work in a society with rapidly accelerated wealth divisions and a society stratified in favor of the wealthy.

If we are to keep NAFTA, and allow Canadian and American capital to pour into Mexico, we have a moral obligation to allow for Mexican workers to come here.