In this thread on Mexican presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=332073 – Evil Captor mentioned (without citing) a recent Pew poll showing that roughly half of all adult Mexicans would like to relocate to the United States. I assumed that would be attributable to their poverty, but John Mace asserted (again without cite) that the results of that poll cut across boundaries of class and income. Even rich Mexicans would rather live here than there. Mexico is not a nice place to be rich.
There are a lot of differences between NAFTA and the European Union. One of the most important is that the EU has open borders: Any citizen of an EU country may cross EU borders with no passport, and, moreover, may live and work in any other EU state, with no (equivalent of a) green card. (Almost. Citizens of the newly admitted Eastern European states do not yet have that privilege, but it won’t be long in coming.)
Suppose we had that same rule for NAFTA? Suppose we declared that any American, Canadian or Mexican citizen has the right live and work in the U.S., Canada or Mexico? How many Mexicans would go north? And what would that mean for Canada and the U.S.? And what would it mean for Mexico?
The impact to Mexico could be potentially devastating. The people leaving would likely be the ones who had the most to offer any economy. Mexico could potentially lose a large chunk of its mosst productive citizens.
The impact to the USA would be different and would be largely dependent upon the reaction of Americans to a flood of immigrants. There’s already a degree of hostility growing towards Mexican newcomers. A dramatic increase could result on a serious backlash.
I don’t think there would be much impact on Canada either way. I know one poster who will soon come running to say Canadians would flood across the border, but it’s unlikely it would make a lot of difference to existing migration patterns either way across the Canada/USA border. Canada would get a lot more Mexican immigrants, but probably not more than it could absorb and anyway Canada could use them.
Related question: The EU has its euro. What if NAFTA had a common currency? (In practice, that almost certainly would mean Canada and Mexico scrapping their dollar and peso and adopting the U.S. dollar.)
The EU did a LOT of prep work before the Euro was introduced. Countries had to harmonize monetary policies (meeting goals for budget defecits, debt ratios, as well as inflation and interest rates) before being admitted into the Euro-zone. I don’t believe that any European nation had remotely as low a per capita GDP as Mexico, either. It wouldn’t make sense under current economic conditions.
Many nations have tied their currencies to dollars, and Mexico could certainly do so if it wanted.
It might make sense to talk about monetary union between the US and Canada, but I suspect that advocating same would be political suicide for any Candadian politician. Canadians largely value their independence from the US (Mexicans does, too, btw), and it would take some extraordinary circumstances to overcome that.
One reason the EU works as well as it does is because the economies of the member states are not that significantly different. An Irishman might want to live in Germany for personal reasons, but there isn’t a flood of persons from one EU country to another.
One analogy to Mexico joining some sort of North American Union would be the current brouhaha over Turkey’s bid to join the EU. And Keep in mind that Turkey has a better ecoinomy than Mexico and a fairly stable government w/o alot of corruption. Of course it also has problems related to Cyprus and the Kurds that don’t have a Mexican analog.
What you’re describing (hostility, backlash) is the impact to the immigrants, not the impact to the USA. The impact to the USA, if you believe the Pew poll, would be 20 or 30 million poorly educated people with few skills and large families. Someone will be along shortly to argue that the USA doesn’t have enough unskilled, uneducated people and needs more.
Latvia’s is $11,500. Poland’s per capita GDP is $12,000. Luxemburg’s is $58,900, and most EU nations hover around $30,000. Turkey actually has a much worse per capita GDP than Mexico, at $7,400.
Granted, Mexico’s population is a lot bigger than Poland, but I bet they are also less mobile than Poland. Anyway, the two situations are not incomperable.
Immigration is not a welfare program. Anyway, if the object is to transfer money from Americans to Mexicans, why not just send the money to them down in Mexico? It would eliminate a lot of dangerous and pointless travel.
If they’re immigrants, then by definition they would be living in the United States, and so a backlash would have an impact on the United States. It would cause problems that would take place in the United States.
While it may be true that 40% of Mexicans would like to immigrate to the USA, there’s no way it happens. The reason Mexicans want to live in el norte is that there’s better jobs there. If the current rate of immigration increases dramatically, the point will come when there won’t be any jobs for them in the USA, and wages in Mexico will rise. That point will likely occur long before 30-40 million emigrants.
That’s adjusted for purchasing power parity. When comparing countries, I think it’s better to look at the raw data:
Mexico: $6.8k
USA: 41.8k
Canada: 34.0k
Keep in mind that the EuroZone does not equal the EU.
Luxemboug’s per capita GDP number, 77.6k, is probably out of whack for some reason or other, but the poorest country in the EuroZone is Portugal at 18.1k
I dunno about others, but I emigrated here, more or less (I never have applied for permanent residence) about twenty two year ago. The border is essentially open north-to-south; all you need is proof of US citizenship to visit, and if you want to settle down and stay you apply for a temporary residence permit, renewable every year without much hassle. You can’t legally work for a salary, not that you’d want to. but you can own land, operate your own business, marry and so forth. Works for me.
Mexico is very stratified society. Ever notice how the Politicians and business people (ie, the upper class) looks entirely different than the guys seen sneaking across the border, or the day workers at the local Home Depot? Generally speaking, there are those who are more European on the top, the *mestizos *in the middle, and the *indios *at the bottom. The last group can be further isolated due to langauge and culture. About 30% of the the populaton is Indian, although only a small portion of that group retains their original languages.
