You insist on imputing to Sowell things that he did not say. What he stated as a matter of fact was, "In reality, the number of jobs in the U.S. increased by millions after Nafta went into effect and the unemployment rate fell to low levels not seen in years."
Those are facts. We can get Total Private Employment numbers here. This leaves out government employment, but I think that's fair. If we added them in, the number of jobs would be even larger, making things worse for your case, so I'm being nice here. NAFTA went into effect in January, 1994. In that month, there were roughly 93 million private-sector jobs. Now there are 109 million private-sector jobs. Did "the number of jobs in the U.S. increase[d] by millions after Nafta went into effect?" Yes.
Unemployment rate numbers are here. In January, 1994 the unemployment rate was 6.6%. One year later it was 5.6%. It has been as low as 3.9% since. We've had a recession since, but even today the unemployment rate is a full point lower than it was when NAFTA went into effect.
Never suspect that Sowell doesn't check first when he makes a statement like that. That man simply does not blow smoke. That's not his act. What you asked for was proof of something he did not say. There most certainly is proof of what he did say.
- Perhaps the trade surplus growth with Mexico before and after NAFTA would be a good indcator?
An indicator of what? Something like NAFTA would cause us to buy things from other NAFTA countries that we previously had been buying from somewhere else... Eastern Eurpose, Asia, could be anywhere. It's probably possible to figure out how much of the increase in imports from Mexico since NAFTA were substitutions of imports from other places, but it sounds like a lot of work and I don't want to do it. I'll give you a break and make a very conservative guess instead. Let's assume that the only thing we bought from Mexico instead of someplace else was oil. That's a good guess, because any increase in oil purchases from Mexico probably came out of the hide of some Middle Eastern country.
So how big is this increase in the trade deficit? We could start with this. This is the increase in our imports from Mexico:
From this we have to back out the oil imports, which most likely are just substitutes for oil imports from some other place.
In recent years we have been importing about 1.5 billion barrels/day from Mexico, at an average price of about $23/barrel. So that's about $34 billion a day, or about $12 trillion a year in oil imports.
Now go back and look at that imports chart. About $12 trillion a year, I'd say. So it looks like almost all of the rise in our imports from Mexico are related to us buying oil from them that we would've bought from the Saudis or someone like them.
To compute the deficit, we need to factor in our exports to Mexico. That looks like this:
Eyeballing these charts, it look like we went from almost an even trade balance in 1994 when NAFTA went into effect, to something like $2.5 trillion deficit in recent years. But almost all of our imports from them are crude oil, wheras most of the stuff we're exporting to them are foodstuffs or manufactured goods. We already know we have an oil import problem, but to promote the idea that there is some "giant sucking sound" of jobs moving to Mexico is to lie to people. We're selling them $9 trillion a year in stuff. We're buying raw materials. Stop this "jobs moving to Mexico" nonsense, willya?
You wanted data, you got it. Now let's have no more arm-waving hoo-hah about jobs and Mexico.