NAFTA Is 20 Years Old – Here Are 20 Facts That Show How It Is Destroying The Economy

Michael Snyder
Activist Post

Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was one of the hottest political issues in the country.  When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans and that it would reduce illegal immigration.

Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen.  He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a “giant sucking sound” as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong. But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don’t even realize that it is happening.

As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called “NAFTA on steroids”, and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.

It amazes me how the American people can fall for the same lies over and over again. The lies that serial liar Barack Obama is telling about “free trade” and the globalization of the economy are the same lies that Bill Clinton was telling back in the early 1990s. The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts

I remember in the ’90s when former Presidential candidate Ross Perot emphatically stated that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) would create a giant “sucking sound” of jobs being extracted away from the U.S.  He did not win the election, and NAFTA was instituted on Jan. 1, 1994. Now, 20 years later, we see the result of all the jobs that have been “sucked away” to other countries.

According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute on 1/3/14:

“Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring “good-paying American jobs,” a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Considering that thousands of kids are pouring over the border as we speak, well, how’d that work out for us?


Many Americans like to remember Bill Clinton as a “great president” for some reason. Well, it turns out that he was completely and totally wrong about NAFTA. The following are 20 facts that show how NAFTA is destroying the economy…

#1 More than 845,000 American workers have been officially certified for Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada or because their factories were relocated to those nations.

#2 Overall, it is estimated that NAFTA has cost us well over a million jobs.

#3 U.S. manufacturers pay Mexican workers just a little over a dollar an hour to do jobs that American workers used to do.

#4 The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has more than doubled since the implementation of NAFTA.

#5 In the year before NAFTA, the U.S. had a trade surplus with Mexico and the trade deficit with Canada was only 29.6 billion dollars.  Last year, the U.S. had a combined trade deficit with Mexico and Canada of 177 billion dollars.

#6 It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas.

#7 One professor has estimated that cutting the total U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

#8 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.  In fact, many of them are now being built in Mexico.

#9 NAFTA hasn’t worked out very well for Mexico either.  Since 1994, the average yearly rate of economic growth in Mexico has been less than one percent.

#10 The exporting of massive amounts of government-subsidized U.S. corn down into Mexico has destroyed more than a million Mexican jobs and has helped fuel the continual rise in the number of illegal immigrants coming north.

#11 Someone making minimum wage in Mexico today can buy 38 percent fewer consumer goods than the day before NAFTA went into effect.

#12 Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#13 Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs.  Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

#14 We have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then.

#15 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, only 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#16 As I wrote about recently, one out of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) do not have a job at this point.

#17 Because we have shipped millions of jobs overseas, the competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely intense and this has put downward pressure on wages.  Right now, half the country makes $27,520 a year or less from their jobs.

#18 When adults cannot get decent jobs, it is often children that suffer the most.  It is hard to believe, but more than one out of every five children in the United States is living in poverty in 2014.

#19 In 1994, only 27 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 46 million Americans are on food stamps.

#20 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

For much more on this, please watch the video by Charlie LeDuff posted below.  It is well worth a few minutes of your time…

So if NAFTA is so bad for American workers, then why don’t our politicians just repeal it?

Well, unfortunately most of them are not willing to do this because it is part of a larger agenda.  For decades, politicians from both major political parties have been working to slowly integrate North America. The eventual goal is to turn North America into another version of the European Union.

Just check out what former general and CIA chief David Petraeus had to say about this

After America comes North America,” Petraeus said confidently in answering the question about what comes after the United States, the theme of the panel discussion. “Are we on the threshold of the North American decade, question mark? I threw that away — threw away the question mark — and boldly proclaimed the coming North American decade, says the title now.” He also boasted about how the three economies have been put “together” over the last 20 years as part of the “implementation” of the North American Free Trade Act.

The “highly integrated” forces of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, Petraeus continued, will become the world’s powerhouse for energy and science. “There are four revolutions that are ongoing at various levels in each of the countries but foremost in the United States,” said the former CIA chief, who now serves as chairman of the KKR Global Institute. “The energy revolution is the first of those, which has created the biggest change in geopolitics since the rise of China since 1978.” The other “revolutions” include IT, manufacturing, and life sciences, which, “as highly integrated as they are, allow you to argue that after America comes North America,” he added.

When you hear our politicians talk about “free trade”, what they are really talking about is integrating us even further into the emerging one world economic system.  And over the past couple of years, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret treaty which would send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.  The formal name of this secret agreement is “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and it would ultimately result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  The following is a description of this insidious treaty from one of my previous articles

Did you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret “trade agreement” that is so sensitive that he isn’t even allowing members of Congress to see it?  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the “NAFTA of the Pacific” and “NAFTA on steroids”, but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement.  This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade.  Most Americans don’t realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food safety, environmental standards, civil liberties and so much more.  It will also merge the United States far more deeply into the emerging one world economic system.  Initially, twelve nations will be a party to this treaty including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.  Together, those nations represent approximately 40 percent of global GDP.  It is hoped that additional nations such as the Philippines, Thailand and Colombia will join the treaty later on.

Unfortunately, most Americans are as uneducated about these issues as they were back in 1994.
That is why we need to get this information out to as many people as we can.

So what is your perspective on all of this?  Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.


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12 Comments on "NAFTA Is 20 Years Old – Here Are 20 Facts That Show How It Is Destroying The Economy"

  1. This is obviously being done for the sake of enhancing corporate profits at the expense of US workers. But what happens when the whole US is reduced to the status of Detroit…? Who will be left to buy the products…? Certainly not Mexicans at a dollar an hour, nor Asians making even less. This can’t end well for US workers. But neither can it end well for the US corporations who are gutting the US labor force, thereby cutting off their ‘consumers’… Question is, what’s the motive? Can it be so short sighted as to be entirely focused on near term profits…? Okay, dumb question. Yes, of course it can…

  2. Answer to the question what’s the motive is easy. Destruction for the sake of destruction.

  3. It should be obvious by now Demoncraps and liberals want to bring America down and force it to be saved by government.

    When there are no jobs people start lining up for federal and state jobs. Two birds are killed with one stone. Come back to papa.

    An American no longer independent of government is the greatest gift you can bestow on a power hungry and politically ambitious Demoncrap.

  4. The only giant sucking sound Clinton heard was………………well, you know the story.

  5. In the very near future Americans are going to be making the I phone under the same conditions that the Chinese are now and most likely worse. A flock of sheep is more aware than the average American. The wolf is not in sheep’s clothing any more and they are still asleep. God’s judgement is coming to America and rightfully so.

  6. As automation and robotization replace workers, there is a population reduction agenda ongoing as well. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyvLaiYAYFQ

  7. I remember in the early nineties my daughter and I were standing on a busy street corner in Sherman Oaks, CA carrying “Stop NAFTA” signs. We listened to Ross Perot and a guy named Chuck Harder broadcasting out of Florida spilling the beans about NAFTA. Cars would drive by and people would shout obsenities or throw empty beer cans at us. Today I’m retired and my daughter can only get part-time work at a big hardware store selling mostly imported goods. I’ll bet a lot of those people yelling at us are on food stamps today. In general we are a very stupid and gullible society voting for Mr. or Mrs. Pretty.

  8. It’s not about jobs – it’s about consumers. How many people would be paying much more for goods if NAFTA didn’t exist? Capitalism should really be called Customerism.

    How many jobs have been eliminated by technology? Wait till you see what’s coming in this area! For example how much less does computing and communications power cost today than say 30 years ago? Is that bad???

    The problem is: how does an economy work when human labor has no value? Leisure should not become a curse.

  9. Mangosteen, $1000 chair | August 17, 2014 at 11:20 pm |

    I was 10 during that election, and so desperately wished I was older, so I could’ve voted for Perot. I told every adult to vote for him, only my grandmother listened..because what did a 10 year old child know? And what kind of weirdo is a 10 year old obsessed with politics? Well, I knew enough to realize that NAFTA was a VERY bad idea, but I’m not happy that I was right. How else could it have possibly turned out, though?? What did people expect??

  10. Just as Clinton’s agenda was NAFTA and WTO, Obama’s agenda is TTIP, the NAFTA on steroids complete destruction of the US. This article is great, but totally understated. Actual statistics show that in the private sector (the non government jobs sector), 60% of workers make minimum wage. The smartest folks in the past 30 years were those grabbing up all those government jobs because now they are making 30-50% more with benefits than their poor cousins in the private sector. Moreover, Obama just signed away thousands of job certificates for illegal aliens under the age of 16, so all those illegal kids in the news lately can go straight to work for the fast food industry. Moreover, it’s not just 20% of all children living in poverty, it’s 50% of all children living at or below the poverty level. The situation in America for the 97% is deplorable, and yet it is still better than in Mexico and Central America. And, we have the powers over the Clintons and the Obamas to thank, as Bill and Hillary are merely puppets, greedy puppets, but puppets nevertheless.

  11. I liked Ross Perot until I learned that he was another anti-female politician who thought women should do what their husbands told them, and no birth control for you. Perot lost because he couldn’t escape those anti-abortion, women hating roots of his.

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