Ten years ago this month, leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed the historic North American Free Trade Agreement. Although NAFTA remains a lightning rod for critics of free trade, by any measure it has been a public policy success. As a trade agreement, it delivered its principal objective of more trade. Since 1993, the value of two-way U.S. trade with Mexico has almost tripled, from $81 billion to $232 billion, growing twice as fast as U.S. trade with the rest of the world.
Canada and Mexico are now America’s number one and two trading partners, respectively, with Japan a distant third. One reason NAFTA remains controversial today is that advocates and opponents alike were guilty a decade ago of exaggerating its impact. Advocates claimed it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. economy due to a dramatic rise in exports; opponents claimed far more jobs would be destroyed by a flood of imports entering the United States and a stampede of U.S. companies moving to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor. During a presidential debate in “You’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” (Hanrahan, 1992)
In reality, NAFTA was never going to have much of an impact on the U.S. economy. America’s GDP at the time was almost 20 times larger than Mexico’s, and U.S. tariffs against Mexican goods already averaged a low 2 percent.
For the past seven months, more than 30 individuals representing more than 10 local organizations have been studying the impact of NAFTA and other international trade agreements on Tucson. The findings of this collaboration, the Community Impact Review, tell a different story.
The impact of trade agreements on health care, food, housing, education, utilities, laws in our community and employment has been, at best, a mixed blessing..............
