I don't suppose their currency crisis (Peso dropped over 60%) might have reduced their imports and increased their exports, even without NAFTA?
It’s fairly amazing to be in any sort of dispute that US manufacturing jobs have been moved to Mexico.
The dispute is not whether any jobs moved, the dispute is over your (unsourced) claim that 3 million moved to Mexico.
Hardly meaningless when we had a trade surplus with Mexico, and were buying oil from them, before NAFTA,
I don’t suppose their currency crisis (Peso dropped over 60%) might have reduced their imports and increased their exports, even without NAFTA?
It’s fairly amazing to be in any sort of dispute that US manufacturing jobs have been moved to Mexico.
The dispute is not whether any jobs moved, the dispute is over your (unsourced) claim that 3 million moved to Mexico.”
The peso devaluation took place in 1994, less than a full year after NAFTA’s passsage. So, since the deficit or surplus was around one billion then, that devaluation does not distort the grown to a $70 billion deficit in the years since.
Your earlier statement that the deficit is mostly oil is far from accurate. This site breaks goods traded down by commodity, and the 2005 figures show oil is much less than half the total. The annual numbers don’t seem to be totaled, but eyeballing it makes the point clear:
http://www.usmcoc.org/eco2.html
It’s fairly amazing for you to mention anything as being unsourced since you’ve source one table and it had no relevance to the conversation. Here’s a table that attributes the loss of 1 million jobs to NAFTA and 1.7 million to trade with China over the past ten years, and 4.7 million lost pre-1994, or pre-NAFTA:
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2005/rasmus0705.html
I don’t recall what number I posted, I thought I said millions of lost jobs. But the numbers are there both before and after NAFTA. These trade agreements has sent millions of jobs overseas and are our biggest unacknowledged foreign aid. Look what it’s done for China.