The North American Free Trade Agreement was never intended to benefit anyone other than North American corporations by supplying them with cheap labor and efficiency. All that NAFTA has done for workers throughout North America is lower their standards of living. It was too true, Ross Perot's ominous prediction that NAFTA would create a giant sucking sound of U.S. jobs moving south of the border.
Once NAFTA went into affect on January 1, 1994, trade barriers between Canada, United States, and Mexico were removed. In search of cheap labor, large corporations moved down to Mexico, removing hundreds of thousands of jobs from the United States and offering wages even low by Mexican standards. And although this created thousands of jobs for Mexicans, it also drove numerous Mexican farmers, small business owners, and laborers out of work who were then forced to either take one of these low-wage jobs or illegally immigrate to the United States and steal a job from an American. The Federal Government has blatantly ignored the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986, forcing States to make and enforce there own immigration laws."
A colossus of a transportation network, known of as the NAFTA Superhighway or the Trans-Texas Corridor, has been under construction for over two years with very little if any congressional oversight. Texans are extremely against it, though it is very seldom spoken about by the media. When completed, this Superhighway will be up to 1,200 feet wide and 4,000 miles long running from Mexico City to Toronto, cutting right through the heart of America and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, sub-developments, and wilderness. It's proponents impressingly speak of it as having ten lanes; two express truck lanes in each direction and three lanes in each direction for passenger cars. In addition, there will be rail lines in each direction for both people and freight, a utility corridor having pipelines for water, oil and natural gas, and electric towers carrying communications and power lines.
In addition to Mexico's lax environmental and labor standards, NAFTA also allowed coprorations to ship goods back to the United States free of tariffs and quotas. The jobs displaced by NAFTA would have paid, on average more than $800 per week, while the average job in the rest of the economy paid only $683 per week. Thus, the displacement of 1 million jobs from traded to non-traded goods industries reduced wage payment to U.S. workers by $7.6 billion in 2004 alone. Yet, those who promoted NAFTA promised that it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the United States, Mexico and Canada, and improve environmental conditions.
Most Congressmen and economists who strongly promoted NAFTA never read the 900 page agreement. NAFTA is not really a trade agreement, but rather an investment agreement which grants rights to foreign investors that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs.
