The effort in restricting illegal migration from Mexico to U.S.A. and Canada has been one major gain for the United States through NAFTA. Comment. (200 words) (2012, 15 Marks)
NAFTA was sold partly as migration policy. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari argued that Mexico wished to export goods rather than people, and trade theory from Robert Mundell (1957) onward treats trade and factor movement as substitutes: if goods made by Mexican labour can enter the US freely, Mexican workers need not. The statement claims this promise was kept. The evidence supports a correlation at most, arriving years later and for other reasons.
The case for the statement
- The numbers did fall. Pew Research Center estimates that the unauthorised Mexican population in the US peaked at about 6.9 million in 2007 and fell to 4.9 million by 2017; between 2009 and 2014 more Mexicans left the US than arrived. Border apprehensions of Mexicans dropped from about 1.6 million in 2000 to roughly 150,000 by 2018.
- Stabilisation helped. The treaty locked in Mexico’s reforms and built a northern manufacturing belt, raising the value of staying.
- No labour mobility was conceded. Unlike the EU, NAFTA freed goods and capital but kept people under national control, apart from the professional TN visa.
Why it is not a NAFTA “gain”
- The first effect ran the other way. Philip L. Martin predicted a “migration hump”: liberalisation first displaces workers faster than new jobs absorb them. Cheap subsidised American maize undercut Mexican smallholders, well over a million of whom left farming, and Mexican migration roughly doubled through the 1990s.
- Wages did not converge. Mexican manufacturing pay stayed a fraction of US levels, so the income gap that drives migration persisted.
- Other causes explain the fall. Mexico’s fertility rate dropped from nearly seven children per woman in 1970 to about two; the 2008–09 US recession removed construction jobs; and heavier enforcement after Operation Gatekeeper (1994), as Douglas S. Massey shows, raised crossing costs while turning circular migrants into settlers.
- Washington itself did not rely on the treaty. It legislated separately, through the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
- Canada is a separate story. Irregular Mexican movement to Canada came through visa-free arrival and asylum claims, and Ottawa answered with visa rules (imposed 2009, lifted 2016, partly restored 2024), not NAFTA.
- The flow changed shape. After 2014 most apprehensions were Central Americans, later Venezuelans and Haitians, a movement NAFTA never addressed.
The present picture
Washington now extracts migration control through coercive linkage, not trade integration. Tariff threats in 2019 and February 2025 secured Mexican National Guard deployments, and south-west border apprehensions in fiscal 2025 (about 238,000) were the lowest since 1970. The USMCA (2020) has no migration chapter; leverage, not the agreement, delivered enforcement. India, facing US deportation flights since 2025, meets the same linkage of migration with security and trade.
Conclusion
The decline in Mexican irregular migration is real, but calling it a NAFTA gain confuses sequence with cause. Demography, recession and enforcement did most of the work, and the treaty’s own agricultural shock initially pushed migration up. NAFTA contributed indirectly through Mexican stability; restricting migration was a promise of its advocates, not a reliable outcome of its design.