Economists point to a host of demographic, cultural and economic factors fueling the mass migration. But many agree that NAFTA accelerated the decades-long exodus of Mexicans from the countryside by opening the nation's markets wider to subsidized U.S. agriculture products.
Mexico has shed nearly 30% of its farm jobs since the trade pact went into effect, according to government statistics. That translates into 2.8 million farmers and millions more of their dependents fleeing their fields. Some have taken subsistence jobs in Mexico's cities, but many have relocated to the U.S.
Not far from Tlachinola, brothers Valente and Francisco Aguilar yoked a team of black-and-white oxen to a scarred wooden plow on a recent hot morning to till a field of spindly corn. The men worked for years in construction and other jobs in the U.S., returning to Mexico to care for their aging parents. Their six siblings are still up north, in Nevada and New York, and are unlikely ever to come back.
The brothers say poor Mexicans have a right to take jobs in the U.S. because policymakers on both sides of the border appear to have abandoned them to their fate.
"Neither government cares about us," said Francisco, who earns about $8.75 for a 12-hour day busting sod for a local landowner.
NAFTA experts say negotiators from Mexico and the U.S. knew that rural families like the Aguilars would be hard hit by the trade deal. The bet was that many of them would find work in Mexico's burgeoning maquiladora export factories. But there too NAFTA has fallen short.
Mexico has lost more than four times as many farm jobs over the last 12 years as it gained in export manufacturing positions, in part because of relentless competition from China.
Economist Jeff Faux, author of a new book on globalization, said the current focus of the U.S. Congress on tougher border enforcement ignored the root economic causes pushing migrants north. He said talk of fences, guest worker programs and Mexican government ineptitude diverted attention from U.S.-backed policies such as NAFTA that have helped create the very flood of illegal immigrants that many Americans are now decrying.
"It's really unconscionable that there is no discussion of the American fingerprints on this," said Faux, founding president of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute and author of "The Global Class War." "There is a lot of winking and nodding going on ... because it's their business constituents that supported [NAFTA] and that are enjoying the benefits" of low-wage immigrant labor.
