A North American integration that includes the people
Photo: Mayra Martell
This week, President Donald Trump has met with his Mexican counterpart to celebrate the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which went into effect July 1. Although heralded for addressing some of the flaws of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on several fronts, the USMCA still fails to correct the contradictory economic integration its predecessor created: an open hand for goods, services and capital, and a bludgeon for people.
During the last 25 years under NAFTA, the United States has treated the movement of goods, services and capital as trade, subject to the rules of free market access and nondiscrimination. At the same time, it has treated the movement of labor as migration, subject to the rules of homeland security and criminal law.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the tension in this approach into high relief. On the one hand, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau urged the Mexican government to reopen factories producing health care-related goods urgently needed by the United States. He wanted those factories declared “essential” so workers in Mexico could return to factories during the lockdown and continue to contribute to the North American supply chain. On the other hand, the United States has summarily deported undocumented Mexican workers and continued to raid and deport Mexican workers already living in the United States, upending lives and tearing families apart.
Yet the movement of Mexican workers to the United States was a direct consequence of NAFTA and the era of integration it ushered in. When markets are integrated, competition creates disruption and displacement. Mexican companies and farmers went bankrupt when they couldn’t compete with American imports. Displaced Mexican workers left the countryside and moved north, often working on farms exporting produce to Mexico, or in sectors like construction, hospitality, restaurants, care work, cleaning and gardening. But this important part of the NAFTA labor market proceeded mostly on undocumented terms, with the acquiescence of employers and both governments. Thus, NAFTA had an implicit immigration policy, and the U.S. position — among both Republican and Democratic administrations — swung between no holds barred and don’t ask, don’t tell.
A feat of NAFTA is that our supply chains are deeply integrated. But it has produced a similar integration of people and families, with movement of workers, tourists, students, consumers and retirees on both sides of the border. Mexican tourism to the United States peaked in 2016 at 19 million visitors — a quarter of all tourists in the United States — spending $20 billion. Mexico is the most visited country by Americans every year, with 32 million travelers in 2019. Currently, 1.5 million Americans live in Mexico, and about 11.3 million Mexican-born citizens live in the United States.
The USMCA is offered as a remedy to NAFTA’s problems. But it leaves this schism between movement of capital and labor untouched, despite extensive de facto integration. Illegality is a policy decision that need not continue. There is a better, legal way to organize cross-border work by expanding the visas that already exist, such as the H-2A agricultural visas, and creating others in sectors where there is demand.
Formalizing integrated cross-border workers in the regional market does not mean surrendering migration controls. It means more control over flows of people, just as with goods and capital, matching would-be employers with workers. Movement could well be organized on temporary or seasonal cycles in response to demand and supply. This would enhance, not weaken U.S. national security, taking border crossing out of the hands of smuggling organizations that financially and physically abuse workers.
Applying a regional market logic for workers would create clear benefits for the United States and Mexico. Reluctance cannot be explained by economics, national security or sovereignty concerns. Last January, I met ranchers in Arizona during a visit organized by the Kino Border Initiative. Several of the ranchers opposed illegal immigration and favored building a wall. But they also favored legal, orderly immigration for workers who wanted to come to the United States to make a better life.
In these testing times, as we reckon with the legacy of racial oppression in the United States, we would do well to look at the legacy of U.S. foreign policy, including its economic relations with other countries and their peoples. Mexicans are seen as both necessary trading partners and criminals that need to be walled out. They are essential workers in the U.S. economy, but they are also deportable at whim. As both governments mark the beginning of a new chapter in their economic relations, they should advance a USMCA for people.
Álvaro Santos is a professor of law at Georgetown Law and faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of the Rule of Law in the Americas. He served as deputy negotiator in the USMCA for the newly elected Mexican government.