The real victims of the Nafta trade deal

Donald Trump is right about one thing, says Felicity Lawrence: Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – has been a disaster for many US workers. It’s deeply unfair, though, to seek to blame this on job-stealing Mexican migrants. Poor Mexicans have, in fact, been the biggest losers of the Nafta deal. The reason so many sought work in the US in the first place is that their jobs back home had vanished. When Nafta was introduced in 1994, it led to an initial growth in low-wage factory jobs in Mexico, but many of those have since gone to China. Meanwhile, the entry of giant, subsidised US grain traders into the Mexican corn market has decimated local producers, driving some 1.3 million Mexicans off the land. Ordinary Mexicans haven’t even benefited from the fall in corn prices. On the contrary, tortilla prices rose sevenfold as a result of Nafta, which obliged the Mexican government to remove some of the state supports that kept tortillas cheap. The main winners of Nafta have been local elites and big, tax-dodging US businesses. But Trump seems in no hurry to challenge them.