It offered neither aid for Mexico nor labor, health or environmental standards. The agreement protected corporate investors; everyone else was on his or her own. (Faux 35)
For Mexico in particular, says Faux, NAFTA has been a failure, and the economy still depends too heavily on the remittances sent back into Mexico by immigrants in the United States, both legal and illegal, to support their families.
The economic disparity between the U.S. And Mexico has become a way for some American companies to exploit workers in Mexico by building factories along the border to benefit from lower wages. This helps Mexican workers to a degree, though it does not do so in a way that raises the standard of living in that country or that keeps many Mexican workers at home when they can make more money working in the United States itself, even for more menial work. In an analysis of the developing globla economy, William Greider shows how the global economy ties countries together so that a ripple effect has more and more power. Various world crises show how countries are tied together in ways that may not be perceived until there is a crisis. The growth in the global economy has been touted as a major boon to smaller countries and countries on the economic margins, but Greider also finds that here, again, the way these countries are tied to the system has produced a return to what he calls "the old barbarisms that had long ago been forbidden by law" (341), by which he means poor working conditions for third-world workers. He finds two reasons -- profits, and more vitally, the quest for and abuse of power: "Firms behaved this way because they could, because nobody would stop them" 341). The very structure of the global economy has been such as to drive down the prices paid for human labor, which creates a situation where abuse is not only possible but quite likely.
Of course, there have been other forces at work in Mexico that have contributed to the movement north and also to the inability of the Mexican government to improve the Mexican economy sufficiently. The long rule of the PRI created a habit of corruption and incompetence that has been hard to break, and the change in political parties after more than 70 years of one-party rule has been a challenge that has not been fully met as yet. Mexico is a democracy, but it is not a strong democracy and is given to repressive measures from time to time. The drug traffic from Mexico to the United States also increases tensions along the border and endangers many immigrants as well. The economic incentives for illegal immigration are simply too great to be overcome with the measures in place to date, and overcoming this problem will require much more economic development in Mexico than has been achieved so far. As helpful as the oil discovery in Mexico has been, it has not done enough for the poor even as it enriches the elite and the government itself.
From the start of the NAFTA debate, analysts noted that the globalization of industry and related changes were having a profound effect on the U.S. labor force, which must contend with increased quotas, reduced union power, job flight, high unemployment, and other issues related to international competition and its effects on U.S. manufacturing. These same forces are having some effect on labor in other countries as well. With reference to NAFTA, it is believed that each government has sought to maximize employment in is own region without unduly antagonizing the other patterns. The American concern is that NAFTA will only increase job flight to Mexico. The door was opened in the first place when Mexico liberalized export restrictions, and though it is denied by U.S. companies taking advantage of it, the main attraction is clearly cheap labor. There are plenty of such workers in Mexico, the pay and benefits are low, and by U.S. standards the regulatory environment is lax. A survey shows that U.S. companies in Mexico have been even more assiduous than Mexican companies in keeping labor cheap. The reverse concern is that while jobs are moving south, worker are moving north looking in some cases for the same jobs that are being exported to other parts of the world as a cost-saving measure. The fact that illegal immigration has not stopped or even slowed suggests that either the salaries in Mexico are too low for these new jobs or there are not...
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