You Decide

… that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has increased since NAFTA?

NAFTA was originally presented as a way to decrease, rather than increase, illegal immigration to the United States. The theory went like this: NAFTA would create a less-impoverished Mexico through foreign investment and the development of good, middle-class manufacturing jobs within the country. With good jobs available in their own country, Mexico’s citizens would be less likely to slip over borders and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

But the Mexican economy failed to develop according to plan. The peso collapsed in the mid-1990s, and roughly two-thirds of the illegal immigrants now in the United States have arrived since 1995, the year after NAFTA went into effect. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, an estimated 260,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico were living in the United States in 1993. Since then, that number has almost doubled.

Those illegal immigrants, some experts say, are pushing many American systems beyond capacity — including public schools charged with the task of teaching children with limited English skills, impending water shortages in 36 of America’s 50 states, and the ever-increasing costs of staffing and maintaining secure border crossings. In failing to raise the living standard of Mexico’s families, NAFTA has left America scrambling to pay for new, unexpected costs. 

… that NAFTA strengthens our diplomatic and economic relations with Mexico and Canada?

Canada and Mexico are now, respectively, the first- and second-largest export markets for U.S. goods. The United States isn’t quite the independent superpower it once was, and we need our neighbors more than ever for both economic and diplomatic reasons.

Thanks to NAFTA, the United States has preferential access to the natural resources of both countries — especially their oil. Canadian trade minister David Emerson, in particular, has expressed open dismay at the notion that NAFTA has been a bad deal for the United States. “Knowledgeable observers would have to take note of the fact that we are the largest supplier of energy to the United States,” he told Canada’s Globe and Mail.

Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, thinks NAFTA has been so successful it should be expanded even further. “I envision North America,” he recently told theSan Antonio Times, “as a single region with a free market not only in goods and services and investments, but also a free labor market, like the European Union.”

If Canada and Mexico, the No. 1 and No. 2 importers of our goods, our partners in the war on terror, and our co-sharers of 7,156 miles of border, are fans of NAFTA, scuttling the agreement could be a diplomatic disaster.