The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been one of the most controversial and contested trade accords of the last century. NAFTA was implemented on January 1, 1994 after years of debate in Congress. President William Jefferson Clinton was a prime proponent of the measure, and had to overcome significant resistance from within the Democratic Party to get the measure passed. NAFTA, in essence, is "a comprehensive trade agreement that improves virtually all aspects of doing business within North America. NAFTA eliminates nearly all tariffs by 2008 between the U.S. and Mexico" (ONIAA). NAFTA also removed many of the non-tariff trade barriers in North America, such as import licenses, that helped exclude some U.S. products from the Mexican and Canadian markets.
NAFTA grew out of the existing U.S. Canadian Free Trade Agreement, which had been implemented in 1989. The idea for NAFTA originated in 1990, when then Mexican President Salinas contacted President Bush to propose negotiating a free trade agreement between Mexico and the U.S. President Bush thought that "further integration with neighbors to the South was necessary for the US to take advantage of its comparative advantage and remain competitive in an increasingly global world. Mexico was the obvious starting point" (Goulet, 6). Additionally, the U.S. perceived that a free trade agreement would be a valuable opportunity to help economic reformers, such as Salinas, in Mexico. Thus, NAFTA was initially conceived of as a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. Canada was brought on board subsequently (Goulet, 7).
Has NAFTA been a good idea for the United States? That is an exceedingly hotly contested question. A review of NAFTA studies undertaken by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) debunked a wide variety of NAFTA myths. CRS reviewed studies conducted by the World Bank, the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. International Trade C...