NAFTA and Mexican Immigration

Guno צְבִי

Guno צְבִי

We fight, We win
It was supposed to be the magic wand that took care of immigration. The North American Free Trade Agreement was to make Mexico rich and create enough employment incentives to keep its people at home. It has been anything but. More than ten years after the signing of the treaty, economic growth has been anemic in Mexico, averaging less than 3.5 percent per year or less than 2 percent on a per capita basis since 2000; unemployment is higher than what it was when the treaty was signed; and half of the labor force must eke out a living in invented jobs in the informal economy, a figure ten percent higher than in the pre-NAFTA years. Meanwhile, jobs in the runaway maquiladora industry that left the United States to profit from free trade and cheap labor commonly pay close to the Mexican minimum wage of U.S. $7.00 per day, an amount so small in the now “open” Mexican market as to force people into informal jobs or across the border.

Peasant agriculture has been eviscerated by the arrival of agri-business and the lifting of restrictions on the sale of peasant land. Industrial employment has been eviscerated by the closure of hundreds of plants unable to compete with the transnationals under the new free-for-all trade regime. The response of peasants and workers thus displaced has been clear and consistent: they have headed north in ever greater absolute numbers. Before NAFTA, undocumented Mexican immigration came mainly from four or five Mexican states and a limited number of mostly rural municipalities. Since NAFTA, migrants have originated in all Mexican states, practically all municipalities, and cities as well as towns and villages.

https://items.ssrc.org/border-battles/nafta-and-mexican-immigration/
 
American media commentators and policy pundits attack the migrants themselves for their presence and greater visibility. They are dubbed “law-breakers” and accused of “taking jobs away from Americans.” But this is just another exercise in victim-blaming. Those truly responsible for the situation are the authorities who embraced free markets as a cure for all economic and social ills. Government officials on both sides who promoted and signed the NAFTA treaty were either guilty of shortsightedness for swallowing the ideological pap purveyed by some academic economists about the “magic” of markets (from which these tenured economists are themselves well protected) or of deliberate deceit. Protected by ideological bromides about “open trade” and “trickle-down wealth,” the balance sheets of many corporations and the salaries of their CEOs and CFOs have grown relentlessly healthier. As the decade progressed, they were increasingly able to pay lower wages on both sides of the border; neatly bypass environmental controls and labor protection codes; and market their wares unhindered here and there. By the same token, state and local governments were set to compete with one another to keep or attract a few industrial plants in a futile race to the bottom.
 
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