It's called Nafta.

Do you really need a source to know what NAFTA is or how it has impacted the working people of Mexico?

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http://www.workers.org/2008/world/mexico_0214/

Tens of thousands of peasants and farmers converged from all over Mexico with their tractorcades, motorcades and other vehicles on Mexico City on Jan. 31. They were joined by labor activists from prominent militant unions in a tremendous show of unity between workers in the cities and the fields. Their demand: Repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

With this action, the Mexican peasants highlight a worldwide phenomenon that you will never hear described in the vicious diatribes of right-wing pundits like Lou Dobbs or the Republican candidates who attempt to scapegoat immigrants for society’s ills. More than 180 million workers around the planet have been forced out of their homelands in the recent period as a result of capitalist economic policies in one of the biggest mass migrations in human history.

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This source is from 2003, but it talks about what will happen in 2008.
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/503.html


Mexico's astounding population growth - which doubled its population in a generation to about 100 million - put even more pressure on the border.

Most of these immigrants come from Mexico's poor farm regions, which have been hurt by NAFTA. Last summer, as the Jan. 1, 2003, deadline for the removal of tariffs from farm products approached, Mexican officials began sounding the alarm.

On New Year's Day, well-subsidized U.S. farmers began selling wheat, rice, potatoes, pork, apples and barley to Mexico duty-free. Under this pressure, Mexico's subsistence farmers are doomed.

"We are facing the prospect of 4 or 5 million peasant farmers deciding that their only option is to cross into the United States," Rodolfo Garcia Zamora of the Autonomous University of Zacatecas told Copley News Service reporter Jerry Kammer.

The situation will get worse in five years when final tariffs are removed on corn, the farm staple that accounts for 55 percent of Mexico's cultivated land. If Mexico's unemployed rice and barley farmers seek to cross the border, what happens when its 4 million corn farmers are out of business?

That's what free trade is all about, you say: winners and losers. Overall, NAFTA has been a boon for Mexico, transforming a $1.6 billion U.S. trade deficit in 1993 to a $31 billion U.S. trade surplus in 2002. Mexican farmers may be hurting, but Mexican