Don’t Renegotiate NAFTA: Get US Out!
While running for the oval office, President Trump noted to crowds how destructive NAFTA was to individuals, businesses, and states. Now he says he may keep NAFTA.
On New Year’s Day in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into being. Despite the enthusiastic backing of then-President Clinton, congressional Democrats, and a large majority of Beltway Republicans, the massive new trade deal and international bloc that it created were controversial everywhere but inside the Beltway.
As discerning observers almost a quarter-century ago pointed out, although NAFTA was being sold to the American public as a “free trade” deal, it was in fact anything but. Its beguiling name notwithstanding, NAFTA was and remains a “managed trade” deal, an instrument of international socialism setting up a vast new array of international bureaucracies to manage the flow of goods across the borders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Included in the deal from the very get-go, for example, was a sweeping set of environmental objectives and rules in a little-noticed side agreement, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, whose enforcement arm is the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, headquartered in Montreal, whose mission is to receive and adjudicate notices of alleged environmental violations by any of the three North American countries.
During its 23-year lifespan, NAFTA has brought about radical changes in the economies of the three North American countries, of which the most conspicuous has been the proliferation of maquiladoras, Mexico-based assembly plants, mostly built by American companies moving assets south of the border, where wages are cheaper and government regulations less burdensome. NAFTA has thus been an enormous economic boon for Mexico, a poor country run by an irredeemably corrupt government — which now has the manufacturing base of a major industrial power. The United States, on the other hand, has experienced a massive exodus of jobs and capital as hundreds of American businesses have moved assets south of the border.
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