ing special help. Castaneda and Heredia state that a good agreement would include
compensatory financing, or the creation of regional funds. In a free-trade process between two or more countries, there is always a long period of transition during which painful adjustments take place. . . The adjustment process has a cost that is, in theory, shared equitably between the parties. . . But in reality, the parties are never truly equal, and, in this particular case, they are profoundly unequal (Castaneda and Heredia, 1993, 14).
The per capita income in Mexico is eight to ten times lower than that of the United States; the distribution of income is skewed to a greater degree; and levels of wages, productivity, and technology are inferior in all respects. The cost of adjustment will thus be much heavier for Mexico than for the United States, though some parts of Canada and the United States will suffer disproportionately greater adjustment costs, even larger than in some parts of Mexico (Castaneda and Heredia, 1993, 14-15).
The United States and Mexico have long been at odds over immigration policy and enforcement, and NAFTA has been presented by the U.S. as being an agreement that will help alleviate this problem by improving the situation in Mexico so that there is less economic incentive for crossing the border. The Mexican government is also counting on NAFTA to ease these economic pressures on the people of Mexico. U.S. supporters of NAFTA believe that the agreement will make it possible to attack Mexico's labor problems, but in truth this will not be possible without threatening the country's political stability or without jeopardizing the economic advancements achieved in recent years. the U.S. and Mexico have radically different views of workers' rights and proper working conditions (Robinson and Dabrowski, 1993, 43-44).
Labor has had an important role in Mexican politics for a long time. Traditional free-market t...