Why I defend NAFTA on DU, in four charts

[Spider Jerusalem]

38. Most of that has little to do with NAFTA

NAFTA was signed into law in 1994. What has happened in terms of the economy since 1994? Entire new industries that didn't exist then, having to do with communications and information technology, have sprung up. Those new industries employ people in jobs that didn't exist in 1994, or existed in much smaller numbers. Many of those jobs are high-skilled jobs which are localised in a few geographic areas; also, the effect of increasing affluence at the top of the income pyramid deceptively skews that "median wage". Inflation-adjusted household incomes for the middle income quintile peaked in 2000 and have since declined. NAFTA and other trade deals led to a massive loss of jobs in certain sectors--the textile industry, to name one, shed nearly a million jobs between 1994 and 2005; those jobs were concentrated in the South in lower-income communities, and the jobs that have replaced them tend to be lower-paid service sector jobs. NAFTA has also been absolutely fucking disastrous for Mexico. It led to dumping of heavily-subsidised US-grown corn on the Mexican market, driving prices down to the point that it put a lot of Mexican farmers out of business and tipped them into foreclosure (and has therefore contributed to increased illegal immigration to the US).