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1 The NAFTA Effect T he North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, vigorously endorsed by the political leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada, was supposed to fix the problem of undocumented Mexican migration into the United States.1 NAFTA would be the permanent solution. The idea was that economic development in Mexico would be enhanced under NAFTA and that development would create jobs in Mexico, encouraging Mexicans to stay home.2 In fact, NAFTA as a method of reducing undocumented migration failed miserably. Even though the agreement coincided with a new borderenforcement regime, illicit border crossings from Mexico continued to rise. The militarization of the border and Operation Gatekeeper, which closed off the easiest places to cross the border, simply shifted the entry points to more treacherous, and in many cases lethal, terrain.3 Most demographers estimate that half a million undocumented immigrants enter the United States annually .4 NAFTA has not resulted in increased employment opportunities in Mexico for Mexican workers, and U.S. employers continue to recruit and rely on low-wage Mexican workers. Is it surprising that workers continue to enter without inspection, given no changes to immigration quotas since the passage of NAFTA? Some observers, like Douglas Massey, have criticized the situation as a shortsighted understanding of how NAFTA would work, arguing that the movement of people in addition to goods should have been anticipated.5 While NAFTA’s provisions facilitated the movement of goods 10 Chapter 1 and services as trade integration was unfolding, no provisions were incorporated to further the movement of labor beyond existing immigration-law categories. North American economic integration under NAFTA and related developments in Mexico actually have promoted more, not less, labor migration.6 Perhaps failing to provide for labor migration in NAFTA was an oversight or even a mistake. Whatever the reason, determining why heavy labor migration has persisted helps us understand how NAFTA failed to address the challenge of undocumented immigration. A free-trade agreement is a pact between two countries or areas that agree to lift most or all tariffs, quotas, special fees and taxes, and other barriers to trade.7 The purpose of free-trade agreements is to allow faster and more business between the two countries or areas, which should benefit both.8 The economic theory underlying free-trade agreements is the concept of “comparative advantage,” which asserts that in a free marketplace, each country will specialize in the activity in which it has a comparative advantage (that is, natural resources, skilled artisans, agriculture-friendly weather, etc.).9 Since each country is specializing in a particular area or product, each country should mutually benefit from the agreement and generate more overall income.10 Free-trade agreements are controversial in the United States. Proponents support U.S. free-trade agreements because they believe that free trade (1) increases sales and profits for U.S. businesses, thus strengthening the economy; (2) creates jobs for the U.S. middle class over the long term; and (3) is an opportunity for the United States to provide financial help to some of the world’s poorest countries. However, critics argue that free-trade agreements tend to increase globalization and the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to other countries.11 Specifically, opponents of U.S. free-trade agreements believe that in the United States free trade has caused more job losses than gains, especially for high-wage jobs, and that many free-trade agreements are simply bad deals for the United States.12 In terms of how NAFTA operated, we will see that free trade has created another problem: With an ailing economy, NAFTA was in fact a bad deal for Mexico because it could not compete with U.S. subsidies to its own businesses, thus producing job loss and migration pressures in Mexico. The standard description of how NAFTA came about (as opposed to a more critical description set forth below) goes like this. Since the 1980s, Mexico has engaged in economic reforms that have relied on international trade. Mexico adopted major measures in 1986, when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and a new ruling elite successfully pushed the country’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).13 Soon after that, The NAFTA Effect 11 Salinas approached the United States about establishing a continent-wide freetrade zone.14 By 1990, President Salinas and President George H. W. Bush had announced the initiation of negotiations of a free-trade agreement between Mexico and...

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