NAFTA reform must benefit the citizens of all three countries

Donald Trump campaigned with pledges to “protect” American workers by building a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants and migrants from Mexico and to fix or do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Those of us living on the border in El Paso know that job loss, undocumented immigrants, and NAFTA are related, but not in the way that Trump would lead voters to believe.

Trump’s claims that NAFTA has been a “disaster” because it benefited workers in Mexico at American workers’ expense and his scapegoating of immigrants reveal that he doesn’t know the first thing about the 23-year-old agreement. That is especially worrying given he is now moving to renegotiate it.

{mosads}U.S. and Mexican workers alike have suffered major job loss, lower wages and dislocation under NAFTA, a deal negotiated behind closed doors with hundreds of corporate advisors playing a privileged role and the public in both countries shut out. If Trump renegotiates NAFTA behind closed doors with the same interests calling the shots, he could make it worse for working people in all three countries.

Already, NAFTA’s been bad, including for us in U.S. border states and our Mexican counterparts who Trump thinks were the winners. One million Mexican small farmers — and 1.4 million others in the farm sector — lost their livelihoods after NAFTA cut tariffs on corn, but did not discipline U.S. subsidies. The flood of U.S. corn crashed the prices paid Mexican farmers by 67 percent.

Yet the NAFTA-deregulated retail price of tortillas — Mexico’s staple food — shot up 279 percent in the pact’s first 10 years as NAFTA’s service sector and investment rules facilitated consolidation of grain trading, milling, baking and retail so that relatively few large firms dominated and raised consumer prices to reap extra profits. Millions of displaced people competed for the hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs that relocated to Mexico.

NAFTA includes protections for multinational corporations that eliminate many of the usual risks associated with offshoring jobs to low-wage countries, helping firms exploit Mexican workers who they pay per day what their U.S. employees had earned per hour. Nearly one million U.S. jobs — 178,000 from Texas — have been certified as lost to offshoring or imports from NAFTA, under just one narrow U.S. government program.

That includes Margarita Jimenez and thousands of others in apparel jobs in El Paso, once known as the Blue Jean Capital of America. For thirty years Margarita worked in factories throughout El Paso, including a factory that made Levi jeans. Margarita’s job and those of more than 40,000 other El Pasoans were offshored to lower wage workers in Mexico.

U.S. government data show that two out of every five displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2016 experienced a wage reduction, with a quarter of them losing greater than 20 percent. For the average manufacturing worker earning $38,000 per year, this meant a $7,700 annual cut. Many here never found full time jobs again, even as some found new jobs in the border warehousing and other industries that sprung up to help transport goods now made in Mexico to U.S. consumers in other states.

It was not just apparel job losses in Texas. While the Midwest exported a lot of corn, U.S. exports to Canada and Mexico of cattle — Texas’ top agricultural product — fell 61 percent in the first 23 years of NAFTA. Texas’ overall $280 million NAFTA agricultural surplus in 2009 became a $1.8 billion NAFTA agricultural deficit by 2016.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, many of the millions displaced from farming found no new factory work. For those who did, wages remained pitifully low. Real average annual wages in Mexico have fallen below pre-NAFTA levels, contrary to the promises that NAFTA would raise Mexicans’ living standards. This 9 percent drop means that the average Mexican worker is making $1,500 less per year today than in the year before NAFTA.

These factors generated enormous pressures for working-age Mexicans to attempt the dangerous journey to the United States. The number of undocumented immigrants and migrants from Mexico living in the United States more than doubled under NAFTA, from about 2.9 million in 1995 to a peak of 6.9 million in 2007, just prior to the financial crisis.

If NAFTA has killed jobs and ripped families apart on each side of the Rio Grande, who then has profited? Trump’s billionaire friends. No doubt NAFTA should be replaced. But it could get much worse if the same corporate elites from before are allowed to dictate the new terms behind closed doors.

A Texas coalition, part of the Citizens Trade Campaign, has outlined what is necessary if NAFTA renegotiation is to deliver for working people. The special investor privileges that allow corporations to “sue” our governments over labor improvements and environmental or health laws before a panel of three corporate lawyers and to demand unlimited sums of money from taxpayers must go. Same for the protections for pharmaceutical firms to raise medicine prices. And a new deal must only go into effect if countries enact and enforce strong labor, wage and environmental standards.

While Trump has exploited the economic insecurity of working class American voters, we on the border will tell you: a NAFTA replacement must benefit working people in all three NAFTA countries. We are fighting against multinational corporations — not our friends and family on the other side of the border.

Cemelli de Aztlan is a lecturer in gender and religious studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. She holds a Master’s degree in divinity from Harvard University and is a board member of La Mujer Obrera and Wise Latina International. She also serves as network weaver for the El Paso Equal Voice Network, a coalition of community organizations rooted in social justice and human rights.

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