Two subjects have dominated the American news cycle lately: the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), deemed “the worst trade deal ever made” by President Trump, and President Trump’s demands for funding a border wall between the US and Mexico to decrease undocumented immigration into the US. These two topics seem unconnected, other than being favorite talking points of the Trump administration. However, the movement of goods and of people have much in common.
I suspect that President Trump doesn’t realize that in the early days of NAFTA’s entry into force, much of the undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States was the result of a provision in “the worst trade deal ever made” that left the US winning and Mexican farmers losing. It has changed the lives of many in the Mexican south forever, leaving entire towns filled with just women, and it all has to do with a little agricultural product called corn.
Corn, or maize, has major significance in Mexican culture. It’s used in tortillas and tamales; in Mexican cities, grilled ears of corn on skewers can be purchased on the street for the ultimate portable snack. Corn is used in Mexican artisanal crafts and forms an integral part of the Mayan creation story. Mexico has sixty-four recognized strains of corn that come in all colors and sizes, in contrast to the basic yellow corn on the cob that is commonplace in the US. Maize is a center point of Mexican culture, a piece of cultural heritage, and was a means of life for many people for thousands of years.
On the other side of the border, corn also has symbolic meaning for the U.S. Saying the word “Americana” evokes for many people the image of a hard-working farmer standing among the rows and rows of corn on his or her farm. Partially because of this symbolism, the production of corn is heavily subsidized in the United States, and has been in some form since the Great Depression. The negotiators of NAFTA were not willing to allow the trade agreement to impact these subsidies. During NAFTA negotiations, the US convinced Mexico to agree to provisions that allowed US government-subsidized corn to enter Mexico tariff-free. While the Mexican government intended to institute a tariff-rate quota system (TRQ) for corn imports for several years after NAFTA’s entry into force, which would help to protect domestic producers during that time, it essentially was not implemented, and the Mexican market was suddenly flooded with US corn.
Before NAFTA, forty percent of Mexicans in the agriculture sector were corn producers. Most Mexican farmers in the south were subsistence farmers, producing enough maize to feed their families and selling any excess that was left over. With the advent of NAFTA, however, and the increased imports of more-cheaply produced corn into Mexico from the US, Mexican corn producers could no longer compete. As a result, many farmers found themselves unable to provide for their families. As agriculture communities began to break down because of these woes, some of these farmers began to look far to the north, to the US. The 1994 Mexican peso crisis (which some experts attribute directly to the effects of NAFTA) exacerbated these negative effects.
Migration between the US and Mexico is not a new phenomenon. It dates back to the creation of the modern US-Mexico border in 1848 when many former Mexican citizens suddenly found themselves living in the US as new border lines were drawn, leading to the slogan “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” But migration from Mexico to the US in the first years of NAFTA far exceeded historical numbers. Poverty and loss of jobs sent many Mexican men to the U.S. with hopes of finding a job to make enough money to support their families they had to leave behind back home.
Nowadays, most of the undocumented migrants crossing the border into the US are from Central America, not Mexico--even as President Trump continues to direct many derogatory epithets at Mexican migrants, some studies show that current net migration with Mexico is negative. And while many of the reasons that these Central American migrants left their home countries can be connected to historical actions of the US, they are not fleeing their homes due to effects of NAFTA. Even so, as “NAFTA 2.0” (USMCA) moves towards ratification in Congress and as political discussions of undocumented immigration to the US will inevitably reemerge as campaigns for the 2020 US presidential election gear up, it’s important to consider how seemingly distinct policy decisions can be highly interconnected.
