The second crucial dynamic involves the impact of Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994 to great fanfare and with the assumption that increasing the movement of goods across the border would actually reduce the flow of people, as more jobs were created in Mexico.
The reality, however, is that Nafta has had just the opposite impact on the Mexican labour force.
Nafta did not lead to the creation of the projected millions of jobs for Mexicans, while most of the profits it has generated in Mexico have either been repatriated to the US or kept by the country's wealthy elite.
Moreover, Nafta's reduction of agricultural tariffs devastated poor Mexican farmers, who could not compete with subsidised US farmers, while the arrival of super stores like Walmart brought ultra-cheap goods to Mexico produced by even more inexpensive Chinese labour, against whom Mexican workers cannot compete.
This dynamic is one of the primary causes of the huge pool of migrant labour who have no choice but to search for work in the US as the only escape from what poor Mexicans describe as their Nafta "death warrant".
And these Mexican migrants come to border states like Arizona, which according to a 2006 Economic Policy Institute study lost twice as many jobs as they produced because of the free trade regime.
Yet advocates of strict immigration policies focus on illegal immigrants entering the US rather than the entrance of US corporations into Mexico which, while 'legal', has far more damaging consequences than those caused by undocumented Mexican workers north of the border."
Read rest of the article, it's very interesting. About the rascist law in Arozona.
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