Ten years after one of the first battles over economic globalisation, enemies of the North American Free Trade Agreement turn out to have been mostly wrong. What’s more, NAFTA’s real significance probably goes beyond economics now. The agreement launched an era of economic, political and social intimacy between the United States and Mexico.
Still, NAFTA has failed to help Mexico create enough opportunities for Mexicans to stay at home. More than 1 million Mexicans join that nation’s labour force every year. Analysts reckon that about 300,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States each year during the last decade in search of higher wages than they could earn on farms and in maquiladoras, or assembly-for-export plants, back home.
Source: Brendan M. Case and Alfredo Corchado, The Real NAFTA Yields Mixed Bag, The Dallas Morning News, December 9, 2002.
For text
http://www.dallasnews.com/dmn/news/stories/120902dnbusNAFTA.5fa32.html
For more on NAFTA http://www.ncpa.org/iss/tra
FMF Policy Bulletin/19 December 2002
