Summary Of Economic Globalization: The Era Of Unocumented Migration

Imagine being crammed in a un-air conditioned room with hundreds of workers in the Mexico heat. Imagine sewing all day and developing sore wrists which can lead to tendonitis. Imagine after nine grueling hours of work not getting paid enough to purchase food and other necessities for your family. Maquiladoras are very well known among the Mexico and US border. They conduct under tariff free materials which are imported to the companies. The North American Free Trade Agreement has a huge advancement and have grown by employing tons of Mexican workers. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) promised to increase workplace efficiency, help corporations, and to improve the lives of many workers. In my opinion, NAFTA did not keep their promise. They definitely did not improve the lives of many workers and everything else they guaranteed. NAFTA has not kept its promises because they work in terrible conditions, they do not get paid enough, and they are giving up hope.

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/26/257255787/wave-of-illegal-immigrants-gains-speed-after-nafta. NAFTA boosted regional trade but had some undesirable effects. The Mexican government used to subsidize corn. It kept the crop price high so small farmers could stay in business. And it kept corn product prices low so poor people could eat. The trade agreement removed tariffs in order to lower costs and encourage investment between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The Mexican government ended its corn subsidy, and the U.S. government continued to subsidize highly productive American corn producers. Seventy-five thousand Iowa farmers grew twice as much corn as three million Mexican farmers at half the cost. U.S. corn flooded Mexico. Illegal immigration led to massive militarization of the border. In Mexico, manufacturers built new factories for cars, TVs and other goods, replacing some jobs that used to be in the U.S. NAFTA benefited corporations operating in all three countries, but it led to flat or lower wages for the working classes in all three

The effects of NAFTA on Mexico, U.S, and their economic situation have impacts on political interests. There was main objective of Mexico in pursuing free trade area with the United States or with other countries to stabilize the Mexican economy in sustainable way and promote economic development by attracting huge foreign direct investment means of increasing exports, in house manufacturing and creating jobs. NAFTA would improve investor confidence in Mexico has directly impact to increase export diversification, create job market increase wage rates, reduce poverty, improve standard of living, quality and economic growth

This means that people that were not able to afford the products can now buy them causing an increase of sales in The United States, Mexico and Canada. No tariffs allowed businesses to compete in the world marketplace to expand and deliver customer goods. Big manufacturing companies saw that the cheap labor was available in Mexico and moved their manufacturing companies. Many of these companies had unions and the unions were negotiating for higher wages. This could have caused a company to go bankrupt or invest in machines (robots) to replace people. This in turn led to manufacturing companies moving to Mexico in order to make profit and continue lower prices. As a business owner I would agree that just keeping a company afloat is not good business. Profits need to be met or company can go bankrupt and jobs will be lost. Many people lost their jobs due manufacturing companies moving to Mexico for profit. About 700,000 jobs were lost in the United States with 55,000 being in Texas. Pg 18. Texas Public Policy released a study that “El Paso is reported to be "hit" the hardest by NAFTA. About 10,000 workers have been effected by the loss of jobs, yet the El Paso region has an increase of exports creating 38,000 jobs since NAFTA”. Economic growth is seen in El Paso. El Paso is growing and seems to be under construction for the last 5 years. The transportation industry is booming as evident by new businesses being built such as motels and convenient stores near the main highways. Construction to accommodate the transportation industry creates new jobs which leads to economic growth. In the last five years of traveling to El Paso and back to Corpus Christi, no matter the time of day, the highways are busy with big truck/18 wheelers. Texas has

“It is important to realize that NAFTA is not the opening up of Mexico,” said Jonathan Heath, a Mexico City economist. “The opening up of Mexico had occurred before NAFTA. NAFTA is the consolidation of that opening up and what it really represents is the locking in of trade liberalization for Mexico.”

In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted between two industrial countries and a yet still developing nation. This was an agreement that was the first of its kind due to the relationship that the countries had and the investment opportunities that it presented. The United States, Canada, and developing Mexico decided to work towards eliminating most tariffs and non-tariff barriers between the three in order to increase the flow of trade in goods and services. Since its enactment NAFTA has led to the providing of over 40 million more jobs throughout the countries, and it has also tripled merchandise trade between the three participants to an astounding $946 billion USD in 2008 (NAFTA Now). However even then it is still not very clear whether enacting NAFTA was worth the time and effort and in fact the United States may have been better off not having joined NAFTA.

I even had to do a quick search on the Internet to see what NAFTA stood for. After reading the article, what stood out the most to be was the amount of indigenous people who have migrated to the United States. I did not imagine the amount of indigenous Mexicans living in the United States to be so high. These people should not be leaving their own country just to search for jobs to be able to survive. They should be able to grow crops and be able to sell them for a reasonable price, not have the price of crops so low to the point that they have to go hungry and believe their own solution is to become farmworkers in a new country. While NAFTA has created jobs, they have caused the loss of way too many jobs and the displacement of more people that I would have

the Mexican agricultural industry had to compete with the far more industrialized US farm industry. Even though the amount of exported products tripled since the institution of NAFTA [according to the economist], most of those exports were maize. The United States was producing a greater amount of grain products and importing them cheaply into Mexico. The amount of American imports overwhelmed the Mexican market and forced them to sell to America and Canada. The theory the United States held was NAFTA would decrease the amount of Mexican immigration. However, this hurt the Mexican economy enough until around 2008 to force millions of Mexicans into the United States, doubling the Mexican-born population to twelve million in 2013 (Sergei, M. 2014).

In layman’s terms, NAFTA hoped to encourage trade by eliminating the former obstacles in order to facilitate the ease of goods and services across all borders. It also expected to improve fair competition by making all countries abide by the rules laid out in the agreement.. An example of how NAFTA has improved investment opportunities is evident in Canada, where the “direct investment in the United States and Mexico[…] has increased by 340 percent between 1990 and 2002 from $60 billion to 205 billion. In addition [Canada] benefited from $225 billion in American and Mexican direct investment in Canada” (Further). As far as intellectual property in concerned, everyone knows that it’s easy to get foreign, more specifically Mexican made, designer knock-offs. Under NAFTA, these practices would be prohibited and each country would have to respect the other’s trademarks, copyrights, etc. NAFTA sets out guild lines to deal with disputes as well as a set of rules that outlines practices and procedures. Through these objectives, NAFTA is tying to improve the relations and the economies of all three nations.

Many economists agree that NAFTA satisfied most if not all of its objectives. NAFTA has had a multitude of other positive effects. The first of which is decreases in price for various goods and services. This can be hard to notice unless one is looking for it due to some prices falling by mere cents. The power of slightly lower prices comes into play when aggregated over millions of purchases. According to Dr. Scott Holladay, an economics

Clearly NAFTA is a highly debated topic because of the ambiguous effects it has had on the US economy. Brent Snavely questions NAFTA in his article published in the Detroit Free Press by pointing out that “the US lost more than 670,000 jobs as a direct result of NAFTA between 1993 and 2010,” he also explains that NAFTA has been blamed for the “manufacturing job losses and plant closures as the auto industry spent billions to build assembly plants and parts in Mexico,” it seems that one of the main issues is that jobs and money has been lost because of NAFTA. NAFTA “provided for liberalization of trade in agriculture, textiles, and automobile manufacturing.” On the contrary, Bruce does highlight some of NAFTA’s positive attributes such as: after NAFTA the “total goods traded with Mexico and Canada – imports and exports combined – grew from $291 billion in 1993 to $1.1 trillion in 2016 which is a 267% increase,” this increase in trade “has benefited the US economy and created jobs in other industries.” Either way, Canada and Mexico have agreed to renegotiate NAFTA, which took two years to agree upon, in order to reduce the US trade deficit in a fair way that still allows for an improved market access between the US, Canada, and Mexico and are attempting to come to a conclusion within the next seven

In this respect, it is worthy of mention that such a situation with the migration is the result of the recent trend in the world economy which is characterized by processes which are generally called globalization. The process of globalization is overwhelming and involves practically all countries of the world with rare exceptions which

The North American Free Trade Agreement or as its most commonly known NAFTA “is a comprehensive rules-based agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico”, that came into effect on January 1,1994. All three countries signed it in December of 1992; later on November of 1993 it was ratified by the United States congress. NAFTA was not only used in cutting down on tariffs between both countries but it also help deal with issues such as Transportation, Border Issues, and Environmental Issues between these two countries. NAFTA changed some tariffs immediately and within fifteen years other tariffs will fall to zero. NAFTA was not created to just lower tariffs it was also created to open protected sectors in agriculture, energy,

Although Immigration is a complex topic with many different factors, the most common reason for immigration is poverty and the hopes of building a new future elsewhere. In the past migration was largely caused by the fore-mentioned issue of poverty, social strife, war, or other political conflicts. As of today these things are still issues and in some cases political asylum does play part in immigration decisions. Globalization is defined as the tendency for business, technologies, or philosophies to spread throughout the world. Globalization is also a major factor in the decisions made before immigration, often times families and friends will eventually re-unite in one region in order to remain together. Living in a more technical world with an advanced society has brought us to the point we are at today, a nearly global community with more in common than in any century before. With the beginning of modern technology in the 1900’s came a more closely knit world, with more communication than what was seen in the past.

Benefits such as new U.S. jobs, higher wages in Mexico, a growing U.S. trade surplus