During his 1993 White House signing ceremony of the three documents comprising the North American Free Trade Agreement, President Bill Clinton stated his belief that NAFTA would create 200,000 U.S. jobs in the first two years after going into effect and a million jobs in its first five years. Other NAFTA advocates made similar rosy forecasts about the jobs that would be created and the favorable trade balance we would accrue with Mexico.

The record of the past nearly 14 years has proven these optimistic predictions to have been spectacularly wrong. As economist Charles W. McMillion pointed out in March 2006, NAFTA champions had predicted the agreement “would lead to U.S. job growth by extending trade surpluses with Mexico totaling about $100 billion by 2005. Instead, the U.S. has accumulated current account deficits of almost $400 billion with Mexico since NAFTA.” The worst job losses, notes Dr. McMillion, “have come in highly productive, capital-intensive U.S. heavy industries like autos, electrical and non-electrical equipment as well as furniture, textiles and apparel.”

More than a million jobs, mostly in higher-wage manufacturing industries, were lost due to NAFTA, as companies moved plants and jobs to Mexico. A far larger number of jobs were lost internally, as illegal aliens from Mexico increasingly replaced American workers here in the United States. Again, this was exactly the opposite of what NAFTA proponents said would happen. NAFTA, they insisted, would produce prosperity in Mexico and thereby stop the economic attraction that was drawing waves of migrants to the United States. Now the NAFTA advocates admit that 12-20 million illegal aliens have flooded across our borders since NAFTA was passed.

Prof. Robert Pastor, a principal architect of NAFTA under President Clinton, acknowledged in a 2002 essay that “illegal migration has increased.... NAFTA has been encouraging illegal migration, not reducing it.” For the past few years, Pastor has been pushing the theme that now the key to making NAFTA work is to transfer a couple hundred billion dollars to Mexico for construction of roads and infrastructure. In his article entitled, “Become a resident of North America,” for the February 4, 2002 Emory Report from Emory University, Pastor declares that “illegal immigration will not be reduced until the income gap between Mexico and its northern neighbors is reduced.” He proposes to do this through a North American Development Fund — funded by U.S. taxpayers, of course. The Fund’s priority “would be to connect the border to central and southern Mexico. If roads were built, investors would come, immigration would decline and income disparities would narrow.”

Prof. Pastor’s plan is already underway, in the form of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) signed by President Bush and his Mexican and Canadian counterparts in 2005. The SPP is an ambitious effort for more extensive political and economic integration of the NAFTA partners, including dissolving the borders between Canada, Mexico, and the United States and merging the three countries’ immigration and border-enforcement arms. And Pastor’s road and infrastructure plan is already under construction as the controversial mammoth project dubbed by critics the “NAFTA Superhighway.”

Of course, closing the income gap between Mexico and the United States, as called for by Prof. Pastor, the World Bank, and the Council on Foreign Relations, can be accomplished by lowering the United States’ productivity and income, as well as by raising Mexico’s. That is precisely what has been happening. If Pastor’s proposed equalization is achieved, the United States will be transformed to look a lot more like Mexico, rather than the other way around.

Under Chapter 12 of NAFTA, increasing waves of skilled service professionals from Canada and Mexico may soon be coming to the United States as “temporary” workers who are covered by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). When that happens, additional waves of legal migrants from Central America may not be far behind. In 2005, the Bush administration succeeded in ramming an expansion of NAFTA through Congress. Known as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), it has added Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic to the partnership. This addition is already sending more U.S. businesses and jobs to those countries.

NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATS are all revolutionary arrangements that fall under the authority of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the newest weapon in the United Nations’ arsenal for destroying national sovereignty and building world government under the rubric of “free trade.” For important perspective and information on the WTO and GATS, see the article "Finding Our Way Back."

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