Moving Up The Ladder

Inside his cramped, two-bedroom house, in a subdivision of identical tan- and cream-colored dwellings, Jose Brigido Aguirre boasts of the changes in his life. Since he moved from his small hometown to booming Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexican border, he's found employment as a technician in a factory. Thanks to a mortgage he lined up through a program funded by the government and his employer, Delphi Automotive Systems Corp. (DPH) in Troy, Mich., Aguirre, 25, now supports three generations--eight people in all--under one roof on $135 a week before taxes. After hours, Aguirre works on a manufacturing engineering degree at a local college in the hopes of further boosting his standard of living. And he wants to put his three younger siblings through school. "I have plans for them to study so we can all make something of ourselves in life," Aguirre says.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Aguirre's story is one piece of evidence that globalization can lift up the poor. Yet in spite of thousands of stories like Aguirre's, not everyone will come away from Juarez impressed. The overcrowded city of 1.5 million is a ramshackle sprawl of cinder block houses and dirt roads. Each year it attracts as many as 80,000 new workers willing to work for less than $10 a day, plus benefits, at maquiladoras--factories that assemble goods for export, mainly to the U.S. To critics of globalization, these roaring plants, fueled by endless supplies of cheap labor, simply prove that free trade has triggered a desperate "race to the bottom" by the world's workers.