Can we have it both ways?
No jobs in Mexico means massive immigration to the US.
Jobs in Mexico means much less immigration.
After NAFTA passed, Clnton Treas Sec Rubin destroyed the Mexican economy, sending maquiladoras to Asia and unemployed to the US. That had much more effect on us than NAFTA.
Of course, NAFTA is Orwellian speak for Negotiated and Favortism Trade Agreement. There is no FREE trade in NAFTA except in the name.
Uh, build the wall?
When NAFTA was being pushed, the promoters pushed that line of B/S, saying that "If WE send our factories down there, THEY won't be coming up here." I always marveled that no one called them racists then.
My sister used to vacation in Baja a lot and I asked her what the Mexicans down there thought of it. The general theme is "Why would we work in those factories down here for less when we can go North and get more pay?".
When Perot was running for President, he held up a photo of a Ford plant already in Mexico and asked "What's wrong with this picture?" I couldn't see anything until he pointed out the obvious - there was no parking lot because, unlike Americans, they couldn't afford the product they made. They lived in ramshackle barrios and were bused in.
I talked with a small manufacturer who had a wall full of patent awards (he devised a machine to segment those canned Mandarin orange slices.).
He had invented a machine that plucked the stems from strawberries without bruising the fruit. He tried selling it to U.S. companies in Mexico and never made a sale. When he asked one manager why not, the guy candidly showed him by taking him on a tour of the operation.
In a room as big as a gymnasium, there were dozens of tables with 15-20 people of all ages bordering them, manually plucking out the stems (he said their fingers were like a blur). On a catwalk above was a guy with a bullhorn haranguing the people to work faster.
The manager said that just washing down those machines would cost him more than what he was paying those people. The deal was that, in order to get that crappy job, the parents had to bring in their aunts, uncles and kids to work for free, so that out of 20 people working, maybe 10-12 were actually paid.
On another thread I wrote about Green Giant laying off their Mexican workers after 11 montsh, rehiring them a month later so they could call them "Seasonal Labor" and not even have to pay the pitiful Mexican minimum wage.
Multiply those tricks by thousands and then tell me how American labor can compete against that.