Lessee, completely racist & exploitive program that hurt our reputation and moral conscience, hurting our reputation throughout Latin America, while ignoring the long-term symbiotic relationship of Mexican workers & US production needs, along with the basic humanitarian aspect of people just trying to move where they can better succeed and care for their families - not an evil intention by any means, one that's natural and should be applauded.

It was this situation that I thought NAFTA would address, and one of my annoyances with the left on trade. 

First, the left is frequently hypocritical - there's a lot of protectionism on the left at the same time it wants to "help" the 3rd world, which presumably means concerts and telethons rather than actually sharing the wealth and dealing with job insecurity at home to help grow jobs & economies abroad in structurally impoverished 3rd world countries especially.

Second, our immigration "policy" is stupid - it turned into a predominately Mexican (about 50%), but poor Mexican primarily, rather than a more balanced melting pot influx from around the world, bolstered by a ton of illegal immigration (stablized a bit) as well as a Mexican-American birthrate that dwarfs the birthrate in Mexico. The results have been perverse - we still talk about "diversity" even when referring to majority Hispanic. The spread across the country has some huge changes - Elgin & Aurora Illinois and Hartford Connecticut both have over 40% Hispanic populations. Providence, Rhode Island's at 38%, while Springfield Mass is 35%, Bridgeport Connecticut 33%, Newark NJ 32%. Where are the Ethiopians, Indonesians, Chilenos, Burmese, Algerians, Bulgarians? It's 2015, we have planes.

Third, while NAFTA has had problems, and hopefully Hillary's sincere in seeing need to improve protections in trade deals from Korea to TPP to NAFTA & CAFTA, there's a lot that seems to be right to the idea of building up Mexico's own production and high-tech industry and to finding equitable ways to increase agricultural trade - sadly the segment that failed the most in this agreement. What isolationists seem to claim is that Mexico would have done much better without NAFTA, and thus oppose most trade deals. This ignores issues like the rise of China as huge manufacturing partner - substituting a good deal for what worked for Mexico in the 1960-1980's period. This paper claims that the timing was also poor for Mexico being too tied to the US during fitful economic performance (1995, 2001, 2008) - while the rest of Latin America grew at twice that rate - whether lacking NAFTA would have changed that, I don't know. The dishonesty of the US in implementing NAFTA is also a big deal - 15 years after the agreement, the US was still resisting letting Mexican trucks drive into the US, costing them expensive & time-consuming transfers to US trucks. Where else we screwed them in implementation is subject to research, but I'm sure we tilted it. A good NAFTA summary here. But the biggest questions remain in how to structure & enforce fair global trade - not to cut down on trade or shift back to regulations-less trade that created our exploitation zones down south for 150 years. Hopefuly Hillary has evolved on this & will seek out more effective ways to tackle these problems than standard free trade cant and WTO/IMF bumbling - India managed to get some traction in its offshored IT industry over the last 20 years. Low margin, high sweat industries like textiles will be harder to make riches in.

I think there was amore, but have other pressing matters.