The North American Free Trade AgreementEssay Preview: The North American Free Trade AgreementReport this essayThe North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)The North American Free Trade Agreement is a free trade agreement among Canada, the United States of America, and Mexico, based on the model of the European Communities (today: European Union). NAFTA was signed separately by the leaders of the three countries, president Bill Clinton, president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and prime minister Brian Mulroney on December 17, 1992 and went into effect on January 1, 1994.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which became effective on January 1, 1994, demanded both the gradual and immediate elimination of most tariffs and other trade barriers on products and services traded between Mexico, Canada and the United States. While trade agreements could serve as vehicles to promote a more sustainable and just development, NAFTA did very little to safeguard our environment. NAFTA transferred enormous power from democratic governments to multi-national corporations and faceless global market forces – and today communities across North America are at a higher risk to dirtier air, unsafe drinking water, and food-borne illnesses.
NAFTA gave multinational corporations the power to challenge environmental and public interest laws directly in secret tribunals for cash compensation. Also in the NAFTA agreement are rules on “trade in services,” which could force governments to weaken environmental standards in areas such as trucking, logging, mining, water supply, real estate development, factory farming, and more. For example: To comply with NAFTAs rules on trade in services, the Bush administration recently waived US clean air standards in order to allow trucks based in Mexico (which comply with much more lax emissions standards) to haul freight on US highways. The increase in air pollution will especially impact Latino communities along the U.S. – Mexico border – communities already suffering from extreme air pollution.
The NAFTA deal is especially dangerous to communities of color, particularly in the South: Many of those communities rely on federal aid to fight for higher-quality health care and education. At the same time, nearly one-fifth of undocumented immigrants in the South still live in poverty, and nearly 90 percent of communities in the Midwest or the Deep South are still black. In the 1990s, just over 14 million Latinos live in poverty, a rate that could soon exceed 50 percent. The Mexican government already is cracking down on undocumented workers in the American Southwest as a means of securing American jobs, increasing the economic burden for local and state communities. In 2015 alone, 3.5 million workers across the Mexico-U.S. border were deported by Mexican security police. This is despite a 2012 law requiring the Department of Homeland Security to take affirmative action against undocumented workers and to create a special program for undocumented citizens. In contrast, in states like New York, states like California and Hawaii recently set minimum standards for workers’ rights such as a right to an attorney (and some protections to keep a job), and no law exempts undocumented immigrants from state income taxes.
Under current agreements, the NAFT is part of a comprehensive program that seeks to address many of the world’s toughest challenges and most contentious issues. Some of these are national security, immigration and climate change, but there are specific areas, such as education, that are particularly important for many poor and vulnerable communities. A 2010 Pew Research Center study highlighted that communities of color in Mexico face the biggest threat through racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, especially in the hiring of Mexican workers:
In 2015, there were roughly 4m Mexicans eligible for the NAFT. Many of these Latinos make up a quarter of the nearly 2 million non-Hispanic whites in America, but as of 2015, their unemployment rate was 27 percent. That means an employment rate of over 50 percent for all of the 3 million Latinos and 1.5 million Latinos in the nation. (1)
Mexico’s economy was the worst performing in America in 2015 at a ratio of more than 30 percent (the lowest ratio in the world over the past 50 years). The number of Hispanics was the second least sustainable in the world over the last 40 years, with a ratio of about 10.7 percent (that is, 10.6 percent of the Hispanic population in America). This means that in 2013, the number of Hispanics in the United States dropped by an extra 1 percent—and the employment rate was actually the lowest of any developing nation in the Americas.
The majority of those undocumented in the United States face the harshest social and economic environments in their lives. One in twelve college students and six in ten Americans earn less than three percent of the median income. The median household income in Latin America is nearly six times the national average, and it falls between the United States and Chile and Japan (the bottom 50 percent). The poverty rate in Latin America is among the highest in the world, and it’s on par with countries like Singapore or Canada.
As President Trump moves toward reversing the U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement negotiated between the United States and Mexico, the country is also moving away from the NAFT framework
In 2000, Mexican President Vicente Fox advocated the idea of free flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border as a second phase of NAFTA, which would be completed in ten years. On September 10, 2001, Fox and Bush met as newly elected presidents and agreed to work “matching willing workers with willing employers” and “ensuring migration takes place through safe and legal channels”, but the events of September 11, 2001