NAFTA as the spur for Mexican Immigration

Down here in Texas, NAFTA was, and still is, probably a far bigger deal than it is to most of the rest of the country. The manufacturing job losses have been felt disproportionately in the older industrial areas of the country, East Coast, Rust Belt, Detroit, but down here in Houston, we really are one of the two main transit points for the goods coming in from Mexico.

One of the things I strongly remember as a selling point of NAFTA was the claim that it would greatly lower illegal immigration by raising the standard of living of the average Mexican. Remember that?

Well, today, I ran across this very interesting interpretation/theory/analysis(?) in a WAPO editorial pointing out the disaster that NAFTA has been for the agricultural poor and working class Mexicans, and how this has led to an increase in illegal immigration.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, could not have been more precisely crafted to increase immigration -- chiefly because of its devastating effect on Mexican agriculture. As liberal economist Jeff Faux points out in "The Global Class War," his just-published indictment of the actual workings of the new economy, Mexico had been home to a poor agrarian sector for generations, which the government helped sustain through price supports on corn and beans. NAFTA, though, put those farmers in direct competition with incomparably more efficient U.S. agribusinesses. It proved to be no contest: From 1993 through 2002, at least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land.

The experience of Mexican industrial workers under NAFTA hasn't been a whole lot better. With the passage of NAFTA, the maquiladoras on the border boomed. But the raison d'etre for these factories was to produce exports at the lowest wages possible, and with the Mexican government determined to keep its workers from unionizing, the NAFTA boom for Mexican workers never materialized. In the pre-NAFTA days of 1975, Faux documents, Mexican wages came to 23 percent of U.S. wages; in 1993-94, just before NAFTA, they amounted to 15 percent; and by 2002 they had sunk to a mere 12 percent.

The official Mexican poverty rate rose from 45.6 percent in 1994 to 50.3 percent in 2000. And that was before competition from China began to shutter the maquiladoras and reduce Mexican wages even more.

So, who did NAFTA really benefit? Not the American worker. Not the Mexican worker. It appears to have benefitted only the corporations who shifted the jobs out of America.

I just thought this might be worth a mention with CAFTA on the table.