Despite this initial, optimistic projection, migration from Mexico to the US has increased dramatically since NAFTA’s implementation. The number of Mexican immigrants in the US labor force almost doubled from 1990-2000 from 2.6 million to 4.9 million. Roughly 11.2 million Mexicans resided in the United States as of March 2004 with 47 percent, or about 5.2 million, holding a regular immigration status. Currently, regional trade agreements such as NAFTA mean that goods and capital are able to move freely across borders than in past decades. People, however, are highly restricted in their movement.

While the US, Canada and Mexico removed many trade barriers under NAFTA, U.S. agricultural subsidies remained in place. NAFTA meant that Mexico’s tariffs on corn or maize, at the center of Mexico’s cultural and economic life, would be dropped over the course of the next few years. Estimates show that U.S. corn sold in Mexico from 1999 until 2001 for a price that was 30% or more below the cost of production. In the ten years since NAFTA, U.S. corn exports to Mexico doubled. Mexico’s rural poor – whose homegrown staple corn was replaced with cheap US corn - bore the brunt of adjusting to NAFTA. The rural poor were given little government support, and many small farmers were forced to sell their farms and leave their land.

More than 1.3 million Mexican agricultural jobs were lost after NAFTA. These job losses were offset by a 1.3 million job increase in the maquiladora sector, producing no overall job gain. Given demographic shifts Mexico has undergone over the past ten years (one million new workers have entered the work force each year) Mexico has had insufficient job creation to absorb new workers. Additionally, the number of maquiladora jobs has fluctuated significantly over the course of the past ten years, and, as this sector has proven to be a fickle one, future cycles of job losses and gains will continue to displace workers. Increased reliance on the maquiladora sector means that the Mexican economy is even more strongly tied to the U.S. business sector and is vulnerable to rising and falling with it.

Some experts argue that a shift from agricultural sector jobs to maquiladora jobs is a positive one that represents progress and maximization of Mexico’s comparative advantage in the global marketplace. However, this shift has a tendency to displace people from traditional ways of life and place them in different geographic settings, in the Mexican case near the U.S. border where most maquilas are located. This first round of internal displacement makes subsequent international migration more likely, as ties to home and family have already been severed. Workers increasingly move in response to global factors over which they have little control, yet, they have no right to migrate legally at the international level. Economically disadvantaged workers are least likely to migrate legally because their immediate economic needs do not afford them the time to go through lengthy visa application processes that, in the end, offer no guarantee of success. As a result, migrants often sacrifice their health and safety to find jobs when work can no longer be found in Mexico, but which are still needed to feed families left behind. Thousands of people have died attempting to make the journey and countless more have sustained permanent injuries and other bodily harm.

U.S. immigration policy will continue to fail to deter undocumented migration until it reflects the reality that the U.S. economy draws workers, thus fueling migration. Furthermore, our trade policies must reflect the fact that US-led trade agreements such as NAFTA, CAFTA and others fuel the displacement of the rural poor in our trade partners. When home economies cannot absorb these displaced workers, they are left with no choice but to move where jobs are being created. Most times, that means the US, where economic growth continues, in part thanks to international trade agreements. Labor is an essential component of trade, and freeing the flow of goods and services while limiting the flow of labor ignores this reality.

The recently ratified CAFTA treaty follows in the footsteps of NAFTA, ignoring the labor component of trade. With the lessons learned from our Mexican trade experience, we should expect to see an increase of Central American migrants, moving from the economic displacement that the trade agreement will create as the rural poor again loose out to US subsidized agriculture. Without a comprehensive immigration reform in the US that recognizes the intrinsic ties between the flow of goods, services, and labor, these Central American workers will join the tide of Mexicans that cross our southern border in order to feed their families from afar when they can no longer do so at home.