NAFTA: it's not just about trade! The North American Free Trade Agreement was intended from the beginning to be the foundational framework for a future North American Union.

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When President Bill Clinton pushed for congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, he argued that the pact would create jobs for American workers--200,000 in the first two years alone. "NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs," Clinton assured us. "If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement."

Regardless of what Clinton believed then, it is now clear that the promised jobs never materialized. In fact, exactly the opposite has been the case. According to a briefing paper published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2006, "In the United States workforce, NAFTA has contributed to the reduction of employment in high-wage, traded-goods industries, the growing inequality in wages, and the steadily declining demand for workers without a college education." That paper, written by EPI economist Robert E. Scott, said that our "growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada have pushed more than 1 million workers out of higher-wage jobs and into lower-wage positions in non-trade related industries," and that "the displacement of 1 million jobs from traded to non-traded goods industries reduced wage payments to U.S. workers to $7.6 billion in 2004 alone." (Emphasis in original.)

Despite the economic devastation wrought by NAFTA, however, its promoters try to deny the obvious. At the North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Canada, last August, President George W. Bush, with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada at his side, claimed: "NAFTA, which has created a lot of political controversy in our respective countries, has yielded prosperity.... It's improved wages and a better lifestyle and more hope." Obviously, many displaced American workers know otherwise.

The Bush administration is working to expand and strengthen NAFTA, steps that would make the economic devastation even worse. For several years, the president recommended a trade agreement extending the NAFTA concept to all the countries of North and South America, except for Cuba. As he put it in 2003: "We seek to build on the success of NAFTA with the Free Trade Area of the Americas." His FTAA proposal has stalled, but he was able to ramrod the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) through Congress in 2005, extending the NAFTA concept to the nations of Central America. And through the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), his administration is working to build NAFTA into a North American Union.

NAFTA was supposed to create jobs and prosperity through "free trade," just as the name of the agreement indicates. But NAFTA was never about establishing genuine free trade, which would entail virtually unregulated exchange of goods across borders. NAFTA was based on regulated trade, with our trade policy no longer shaped by Congress but by the new transnational regulatory bureaucracy NAFTA created.

Means to an End

Nor is NAFTA just about trade--"free" or otherwise. From the very beginning, it was intended to be the means to merge the member nations economically and politically, following the path already taken by the European Union. And in fact, some NAFTA critics, this magazine included, made this very point prior to congressional approval. But many NAFTA promoters dismissed this charge as ludicrous, claiming instead that NAFTA was merely about eliminating tariff barriers.

NAFTA promoter William A. Orme, Jr. was not among them. Orme is the author of the 1993 book Continental Shift (later republished under the title Understanding NAFTA), described by the Boston Globe as "the best, most balanced picture of the [NAFTA] issue yet to appear." In a column appearing in the Washington Post for November 14, 1993, just a few days before Congress approved NAFTA, Orme approvingly wrote that "NAFTA would restructure the continent, with lines of people and goods running north-to-south as well as east-to-west, and once-fixed borders blurring in overlapping spheres of economic influence and political power." NAFTA, he said, "is the framework for a relationship that would restructure much more than just trade."

Summarizing the debate about the true intent behind NAFTA--eliminating tariffs or creating a "European-style common market"--NAFTA promoter Orme admitted that the NAFTA critics were "essentially right":

   When NAFTA was first proposed, critics in all three countries
   claimed that its hidden agenda was the development of a
   European-style common market. Didn't Europe also start out with a
   limited free trade area? And, given the Brussels precedent,
   wouldn't this mean ceding some measure of sovereignty to unelected
   bureaucrats? Even worse, wouldn't this lead to liberalization and
   collaborative policy making in many other sensitive areas, from
   monetary policy and immigration to labor and environmental law?

      NAFTA's defenders said no. They argued that the agreement is
   designed to dismantle tariff barriers, not build a new regulatory
   bureaucracy....

      Yet the critics were essentially right. NAFTA lays the foundation
   for a continental common market, as many of its architects
   privately acknowledge. Part of this foundation, inevitably, is
   bureaucratic: The agreement creates a variety of continental
   institutions--ranging from trade dispute panels to labor and
   environmental commissions--that are, in aggregate, an embryonic
   NAFTA government.

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NAFTA promoter Henry Kissinger, a key member of America's foreign-policy establishment, also acknowledged during the 1993 NAFTA debate that NAFTA would be far more significant than just another trade agreement. "It [NAFTA] will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere," the former secretary of state enthused in a column appearing in the Los Angeles Times for July 18, 1993. "[NAFTA] is not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system."

On November 29, 1993, nine days after the U.S. Senate passed the NAFTA implementation legislation, completing congressional action, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake sent a memo to President Clinton stating: "Hemispheric institutions, including the OAS [Organization of American States] and Inter-American Development Bank and now the NAFTA institutions, can be forged into the vital mechanisms of hemispheric governance." This internationalist perspective is particularly infuriating when one realizes that Lake, in his role as national security adviser, should have been telling the president how to keep our nation independent, not how to submerge our nation in hemispheric governance.

End Goal

The record of the last 14 years shows that numerous elitists have been trying to move us in the direction described by Orme, Kissinger, and Lake. The Republican president now residing in the White House has been a willing partner in the drive to create a merger, as was his Democratic predecessor. If these individuals achieve their goal, not just jobs but the independence of our great country and even our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms will be lost. Yet the very fact that they have had to proceed slowly and stealthily, and have experienced setbacks such as the stalled FTAA agreement, shows that the unfolding NAFTA-NAU process can be exposed and reversed.