Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The American Prospect

How NAFTA failed Mexico: immigration is not a development policy. (Immigration And Work).

Article Excerpt
During the 1993 battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement, the proposal's promoters' most politically effective argument was that NAFTA would keep Mexicans out of the United States. As political writer Elizabeth Drew later observed, "Anti-immigration was a sub-theme used, usually sotto voce, by the treaty's supporters."

The voce was not always sotto. "We don't want a huge flow of illegal immigrants into the United States from Mexico," said former President Gerald Ford, speaking at one of then-President Bill Clinton's pro--NAFTA rallies. "If you defeat NAFTA, you have to share the responsibility for increased immigration into the United States, where they want jobs that are presently being held by Americans."

Leaving aside the xenophobia, Ford's argument made economic sense: If NAFTA were to create more jobs in Mexico, fewer Mexican workers would leave. When people can earn a decent living in their own country, they would generally rather stay put.

Thus although workers in the poorer European countries can get jobs anywhere in the common market, few have moved across national borders because jobs in their own countries are expanding. Growth in the European Union periphery was largely stimulated by so-called cohesion funds, provided by richer nations for public investment. The program was so successful that, after centuries of exporting people to the rest of the world, Ireland in 1996 became a net importer of migrants.

NAFTA proponents, on the other hand, claimed that merely opening Mexico to free trade and unregulated foreign investment would produce the job growth and rising incomes needed to create a stay-at-home middle class. It was the capstone on an effort begun in the early 1980s by a group of U.S.-educated economists and business people who took over the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in order to build a privatized, deregulated and globalized Mexican economy. Among their chief objectives was tearing up the old corporatist social contract in which the benefits of growth were shared with workers, farmers and small-business people through an elaborate set of institutions connected to the PRI.

NAFTA provided no social contract. It offered neither aid for Mexico nor labor, health or environmental standards. The agreement protected...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!