standards would be ignored. Studies seemed to indicate that these concerns were not justified. President Carlos Salinas of Mexico treated NAFTA as a major element in his development policy and as a way to "lock in" the national, rural, and urban elements of this policy initiated by himself and President Miguel de la Madrid.
Critics in the U.S. raised a number of objections. For example, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C., said that the treaty was "the last thing the United States needs," while Richard Gephardt, the House majority leader, told the administration that he could not back the treaty on "a leap of faith" as he felt he was being asked to do. Free trade with a developing country like Mexico was a particular concern to America's organized labor and environmentalist groups that believe that Mexico's laws in these areas are too weak and poorly enforced. Mexican workers receive low wages partly because they are deprived of rights they would have in the U.S. Manufacturers have lower costs because they do not have to live by U.S. environmental standards many see as costly. Unions predicted that this would mean job and wage cuts in the U.S. as companies move south to Mexico, while environmentalists feared that NAFTA would both undermine American laws and also devastate the Mexican environment as polluters move south ("After NAFTA," 1993, 71).
Maxfield (1990) noted some of the problems that would be facing Mexico in the near future when she indicated that Mexico's political future depends to a great extent on the country's national economic performance and the individual economic well-being of its citizens. However, as Maxfield writes,
. . . the more internationally integrated financial markets become, the harder it is to induce domestic capitalists to make long-term fixed investments. . . As the threat of exit becomes more credible and the potential damage greater, policymakers ...