Abstract

When Americans think about free trade and Mexico, we usually think of one thing: the giant sucking sound of U.S. jobs being lost to cheaper labor in the south. We lose, they gain. Our family-wage jobs become their $2 per hour step up from rural poverty; that's the shorthand summary of what the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) looks like from our side of the border.

If that story was true at one point, however, it is no longer. Barely ten years since NAFTA was signed, many Mexicans find themselves in a position surprisingly similar to that of American workers: apparently too expensive for international investors, they're watching their jobs leave the country by the tens of thousands.

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