North American Free Trade Agreement
The election of Joe Biden and the return of Democratic Party control of Congress has raised hope that Trump’s disastrous immigration policies could be undone. Separated and incarcerated families long to be reunited and freed, refugees blocked into deadly camps at the border wait for legal channels to be reopened, undocumented workers cut out of pandemic relief efforts endure dangerous working conditions and economic devastation, and all Trump’s other orders designed to be cruel and inhumane urgently need to be reversed.
North American capitalism has been transformed into two over-lapping, yet starkly contradictory realities for capital and labor. Nowhere is this more apparent than through observation of what has taken place between the United States and Mexico over the last three decades. Through the aegis of the state, its two major political parties, and its junior counterparts across national boundaries, the US capitalist class has transformed the region into a singular borderless economy for capital.
Integration in this form has been accomplished through what are mischaracterized as “free-trade agreements” (FTAs). These were imposed under authoritarian conditions. Freedom was conspicuously absent when FTAs were dictated to the Mexican people during economic crisis as conditional in exchange for emergency loans. These “structural adjustment programs” required by outside entities such as the International Monetary
