[CTC] NAFTA belongs in the border wall debate

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/nafta-belongs-in-the-border-wall-debate/article_27451d36-62a9-50eb-8eca-1f7b484eea5f.html <https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/nafta-belongs-in-the-border-wall-debate/article_27451d36-62a9-50eb-8eca-1f7b484eea5f.html> 

NAFTA belongs in the border wall debate
By Angie O’Gorman 

Missing from President Donald Trump’s re-negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement is any mention of the initial agreement’s failure to reduce illegal Mexican immigration to the United States — one of its stated goals.

It’s fair to ask why, and why Trump’s border wall rhetoric, similarly silent on NAFTA’s failure, would have us believe it necessary to forcibly remove children from their undocumented parents in order to deter further illegal immigration.

You’d think it would be a lot easier and cheaper to negotiate a fix to NAFTA rather than build a multibillion-dollar wall or house Mexico’s share of the New York Times-estimated 13,000 de-parented children now in custody related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Makes you wonder.

Both progressive and conservative commentators note that curbing undocumented immigration is NAFTA’s unkept promise. “There is no indication on either side that NAFTA has meaningfully reduced illegal immigration ...,” note James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, “only different reasons why this goal has not been achieved.”

In NAFTA’s impact on Mexico, the Sierra Club is more pointed. “NAFTA has created a legacy where corporate profits are promoted at the expense of environmental safeguards, health protections, and workers’ rights. Two of those rights are land ownership lost under NAFTA and a livable wage.”

In a paragraph, that’s it. Not surprising, but still a major challenge to cries that a border wall is the only solution. These are the “push factors,” the aspects of the Mexican economy that force people to emigrate for survival, what Trump refuses to talk about publicly in either the NAFTA or border wall context.

Rather than addressing illegal immigration through livable manufacturing wages and humane working conditions, NAFTA allowed the maquiladora sector to undercut both in order to attract foreign investment. More than 2,700 maquiladoras were constructed for export-oriented manufacturing along the already environmentally strained and overpopulated border region.

Wages and purchasing power fell for most Mexicans and 130,000 jobs were lost in domestic manufacturing due to the replacement of domestically produced goods by imports. The average manufacturing worker, except in the automotive industry, now earns only 28.6 percent of what a family of four needs to cover necessities. According to McBride and Sergie, 75 percent of the Mexican population lived in poverty in 2001 compared to 49 percent in 1981, before NAFTA reforms.

Mexico’s farmers fared no better. Even before NAFTA was signed, Mexico’s rural peasants and their lands were devastated by NAFTA-related agreements wherein Mexico agreed to allow foreign ownership of land, thus taking from peasants both communal and private property. Additionally, NAFTA opened its doors to U.S. dumping large amounts of subsidized agricultural goods, especially corn, on the Mexican market, lowering prices and generally ruining the livelihood of peasant farmers. Pre-NAFTA, corn was the primary crop in Mexico. Post-NAFTA, farmers received 70 percent less for their harvests.

Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that NAFTA put almost 2 million small-scale Mexican farmers out of work. They could neither compete with U.S. prices nor had other employment prospects in their rural communities. They were too numerous, and of a different skill set, to be absorbed into the 700,000 NAFTA-created manufacturing jobs. Next stop, the U.S. border.

Missouri has both gained much and lost much under NAFTA. More than 97,000 Missouri manufacturing jobs are gone according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.7 percent of our manufacturing workers. Though NAFTA did not bury Missouri manufacturing as it did Mexico’s farming sector, we have a taste of the underside of such agreements and the suffering they cause. We know such displacement has ripple effects for the wider economy.

While the particulars may be elusive, the general thrust of an effective restructuring of NAFTA would remedy wage, land ownership and import/export distortions in the original agreement.

Let’s admit that in order to keep U.S. profits high, NAFTA increased illegal immigration to the United States. We need to fix the problem, not Band-Aid the border. NAFTA belongs in the border wall debate if we’re serious about decreasing illegal immigration to the United.

Angie O’Gorman practiced immigration law for 25 years and is now a freelance writer focusing on issues of economics and immigration.
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