NAFTA Numbers Don\u27t Add Up

On November 17,1993, the U.S. Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which became the law of the land in Canada, Mexico, and the United States on January 1, 1994. Despite the passage of over a year, there has been precious little discussion of the economic results of the free trade agreement. In fact, until the recent devaluation of the Mexican peso, proponents of NAFTA had claimed that the matter was settled and not worthy of further discussion or investigation. It was a fait accompli, they said; time to move on to other, more pressing social and political issues. The irony of this thinly disguised attempt to stifle public inquiry is that only now—one year after the passage of NAFTA—can its impact be tested in the field and reality substituted for rhetoric