Thread: NAFTA helped increase flow of illegal immigrants

http://www.startribune.com/146/story/415679.html

Last update: May 07, 2006 – 4:54 PM

Business Forum: NAFTA helped increase flow of illegal immigrants
Advocates say free trade has worked as intended. But the result has been a vast increase in illegal migration.
By David Morris

The debate about illegal immigration rarely mentions the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. That's regrettable, since the flood of illegal Mexicans in 2006 empirically challenges the philosophy that guided NAFTA's design.
The slogan of those who championed NAFTA was, "Trade, not aid."

The pact would solve our problems with little or no transfer of funds from richer Canadians and Americans to poorer Mexicans, it was widely believed.

By raising Mexican living standards and wage levels, Attorney General Janet Reno predicted, NAFTA would reduce illegal immigration by up to two-thirds in six years. "NAFTA is our best hope for reducing illegal migration in the long haul," Reno declared in 1994. "If it fails, effective immigration control will become impossible."

NAFTA succeeded, at least on its own terms. As Jaime Serra Puche, Mexico's former trade minister and chief NAFTA negotiator recently observed, "When you look at NAFTA in terms of what NAFTA was made for, which were trade flows, investment flows, and in general technological transfer and so on, you can say that NAFTA has been a successful enterprise."

Trade now constitutes 55 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, up from about 30 percent in 1990. Foreign investment in Mexico has increased by more than 225 percent since 1994.

So when you look at the pact in terms of what it was intended to do, based on what those who wrote it said it was intended to do, it has been a smashing success.

At this point, bringing up an old medical adage might be appropriate: "The surgery was successful, but the patient died." NAFTA achieved its intended goals. But the flood of illegal immigrants to the United States is up, and the standard of living of the average Mexican is down.

Real wages for most Mexicans are lower than when NAFTA took effect. And Mexican wages are diverging from rather than converging with U.S. wages, despite the fact that Mexican worker productivity has increased dramatically.

As NAFTA intended, Mexico has become an export-dependent economy. But this has not benefited most Mexicans. Sandra Polaski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out that Mexican manufacturing increasingly is based on a production model in which component parts are imported, then processed or assembled and then re-exported. The spillover effect of such operations on the broader economy is very limited.

Ironically, one might argue that illegal migration is the only thing saving Mexico from the ravages of NAFTA.

Illegal migration serves as an important safety valve. In the past 10 years, Mexico's working-age population has expanded by about 1 million per year, but the number of jobs has expanded by only half as much, according to a Carnegie study. The annual exodus of 500,000 to 1 million Mexicans reduces labor unrest inside the country.

Migration serves another even more important function: national financial safety net. In 2005, Mexicans in the United States remitted some $20 billion home, about 3 percent of Mexico's national income, according to a March story by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau. Remittances now exceed tourism, oil and the maquiladoras as the country's top single source of foreign exchange.

NAFTA boasted that trade, not aid, would boost the lot of Mexico and Mexicans. Ironically, the only thing that is keeping the wolf from Mexico's door is aid from the United States, via Mexicans living in the United States, not trade.

The European model

It didn't have to be this way. Consider the recent history of the European Union. Europeans realize that the flow of migrants increases when the income gap between countries widens. Thus the European Union invested hundreds of billions of dollars in its poorer countries to reduce the income gap and intra-European tensions between farmers and workers.

This massive investment enabled the E.U.'s four poorest members -- Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain -- to boost their per-capita GDP from 65 percent of the overall E.U. average in l986 to 78 percent in l999.

Unlike Americans, Europeans knew that both trade and aid are needed to make economic integration work.

I would add only one other ingredient to this recipe for success: internally generated development. Sustainable economic development comes from within, from expanding internal markets and internal production that supplies those markets.

Sustainable economic development comes from strengthening, not weakening, local and regional trade networks. And this, in turn, depends on strengthening and not weakening local and regional social networks.

People don't leave their communities, their friends, their families and their cultures because they want to. They leave when they have to.

NAFTA's designers promised it would keep Mexicans at home. Yet its very objectives undermined that possibility. Now leaders in all three countries are trying to pick up the pieces.

One hopes they would use this opportunity to revisit their original premise and model as well.

David Morris is vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. His e-mail is dmorris@ilsr.org.

NAFTA was a con game and did nothing as intended for the American People. CAFTA is a con game and will do nothing as intended for the American People. Every single FTA is by design a tool to drain the US of industry and flood our nation with people we can not sustain successfully.

They all need to repealed and we need to withdraw from the World Trade Organization immediately.

added to the homepage

http://www.alipac.us/article1203.html

As many of us knew then, NAFTA was a sell out and betrayal of not only critical American manufacturing and industry, but a betrayal of legal and responsible immigration. Unfortunately, conservatives were likewise betrayed by the Republican party, loud-mouthed globalist shills like Fatso Limbaugh, and Jorge's own father who lost the 1992 election because he stabbed hard working Americans in the back. His son Jorge is finishing up sell out betrayal and destruction of America along with help from the RINO traitors, liberal Democrats, and international neo-communists. NAFTA which not only eliminated trade "barriers", also eliminated immigration "barriers" and created a superhighway for illegal immigration, drug trafficking, infectious diseases, and terrorism. Jorge, feeling American agriculture had it too good and easy, created his own sell out betrayal (CAFTA). Now American farming has to compete with dirt poor, third world imports in food. CAFTA also includes cross-border/nation traffic between the US and veven poorer third world populations in addition to the 25-30 million illegal aliens already here from the usual suspects.

NAFTA did NOTHING it was promised to. It didn't uplift Mexico's economy. It didn't slow or stop illegal immigration. It didn't reform Mexican politics or government. And, finally it did not, NOT take jobs out of the United States and relocate them to Mexico. As we all knew, this, like the China trade imbalance nightmare, was not a mutually beneficial trade agreement of any kind. These were nothing but massive labor and industry outsourcing agreements greedy corporate thugs bought and bribed political whores in Washington for. The last 30-40 years have been a period of betrayal and corruption that make the period of the Robber Barons seem pale in comparison. As bad as they were, at least they didn't seek to undermine and destroy the foundation of American civilization by throwing the borders wide open to massive illegal immigration and imploding society. What we have now is national chaos and corruption on a scale unseen and unheard of before that threatens to put this country beyond the point of recovery.

Every time we sign a trade agreement we get the short end of of the stick. Forget the WTO.

Well you folks better be on the stick when it comes to the FTAA, Free Trade Area of the Americas which combines the U.S Canada and Mexico. I have been getting dozens of news alerts daily on it. The thing is gaining momentum and it is just a matter of time before congress votes on it. The CFR wants it in place by 2010.

jp, like NAFTA, FFTA has a ready bank of liars, phonies, and bought and paid for bagmen whose job 24/7 is to write newspaper articles, appear on TV and talk shows, and fund websites proclaiming the glory of globalism and these stupid, self-destructive sell outs. The last time I debated these jerks about CAFTA, Republican so-called "conservative" fat cats came out of the woodwork to denounce me and others opposing CAFTA as xenophobes, labor union stooges, and even racists. It also doesn't help when loud-mouthed Bushbot idiots on the radio supposedly speaking for "conservatism" praise these sovereignty killing schemes even when they know nothing about them since they are multi-millionaires and live in mansions and have never spent one day breaking a sweat in manual labor.

Finally, I have as yet to hear any liberals or Democrats in any meaningful numbers opposing these stupid, job killing arrangements. Even when these stupid trade (labor outsourcing) agreements are shown to be utter failures, the character assassination machine goes into full swing to protect ongoing corruption and smear opponents. My amazement is at how successful the pro-globalist spin machinery is at convincing average Americans that their worst enemy is another American working for a decent wage producing goods and services in America. The dumbed-down left-wing multiculturalist neo-communist public education system has inculcated too many people with the ridiculous notion that poor third world countries got that way precisely because American "greed" and a higher standard of living here was derived from denying and oppressing others.

That's the enemy we have to face, abject stupidity, corruption, and liberal indoctrination almost from birth. Therefore, globalism is sold as "social justice" when it is in fact social injustice and exploitation of the many, on behalf of a few, on a global scale.