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The Pros And Cons Of NAFTA

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The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) was created for the United States, Canada, and Mexico to remove obstacles endured with the exchange of goods and services among the three countries. As reported by Villarreal and Ferguson, “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entered into force on January 1, 1994. The agreement was signed by President George H.W. Bush on December 17, 1992, and approved by Congress on November 20, 1993” (p. iv). It took three presidents to get the completed NAFTA into motion. President Ronald Reagan started it off in 1980 with his campaign. He wanted to unify North America to help better compete with EU. Next in 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed NAFTA after entering the office. It then went back to …show more content…

The easier exchange of good and services among the three countries was also to facilitate the creation of more jobs. It has also impacted employment from the bottom up.
Essentially the way NAFTA works can be broken down into six points. Firstly, NAFTA grants the most-favored nation status to all co-signers. The countries are required to treat all parties involved in a trade agreement with equal handling. They cannot give one party special treatment, for example, giving a better deal to a domestic investor versus a foreign one. And it goes the same with giving better deals to non-NAFTA investors as well. Second, NAFTA took away tariffs on imports and exports between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA created rules to help regulate the trade of clothing, farm produce, and cars. This helped to reduce the prices of foreign goods being traded within the three countries. Third, regulations were put in place to ensure all products being traded must originate in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. The exporters were required to get a Certificate of Origin to waive the tariffs. …show more content…

Between 1993 and 2013, the US trade deficit with Mexico and Canada increased from $17.0 to $177.2 billion, displacing 851 700 US jobs’ (Scott, The Effects). The manufacturing industry utilizes factories to create multiple different types of merchandise such as clothing, automobiles, and electronic appliances. One reason for the decline is the moving of the manufacturing jobs to Mexico. According to Scott, “…most U.S. exports to Mexico are parts and components that are shipped to Mexico and assembled into final products that are then returned to the United States. Many manufacturers in the U.S. are unionized and pay above minimum wages to the employees. Moving to Mexico, they could pay less for labor and make more of a profit. Hufbauer and Schott report, “In 1991, the average hourly compensation in Mexican manufacturing was only about 14 percent of the U.S. figure: $2.17 in Mexico versus $15.45 for the United States” (qtd Burfisher et all 128). The garment industry was already suffering as a result of illegal aliens working in the United States. “The implementation of NAFTA has accelerated the decades-long decline in garment production and employment in the United States by increasing the competitiveness of Mexican-sewn imports and fueling the expansion of maquiladora production in Mexico” (Spener and Capps 301). In previous years, all of the garment industry jobs were not majorly lost to Mexico but to other

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