NAFTA has also had a detrimental effect on Mexican workers as well. The increased export of U.S. subsidized corn destroyed the livelihoods of 1 million Mexican campesino farmers and the roughly 1.4 million workers whose livelihoods depended on such agriculture. The displacement of such workers has created downward wage pressure, and 60% of the rural population in Mexico still falls below the poverty line, despite the promises made by NAFTA's boosters.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/01/1255736/-NAFTA-at-20-An-Unhappy-Birthday-and-a-Look-at-the-Roll-Call-Votes-on-Free-Trade-Deals#

The newly announced Audi plant will pay them $8/hour. NAFTA, and similar trade agreements, are helping a lot of people in Mexico. And, it will get better. That's not to say life is perfect, but it is better than it would be without foreign investment. Hence, Mexico asked to be part of TPP and a bunch of other trade agreements.

Nafta has cut a path of destruction through Mexico. Since the agreement went into force in 1994, the country’s annual per capita growth flat-lined to an average of just 1.2 percent -- one of the lowest in the hemisphere. Its real wage has declined and unemployment is up.
<snip>
Not all of Mexico’s problems can be laid at Nafta’s doorstep. But many have a direct causal link. The agreement drastically restructured Mexico’s economy and closed off other development paths by prohibiting protective tariffs, support for strategic sectors and financial controls.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain

Mexico ranks 18th of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards.

From 1960-1980, Mexican real GDP per person almost doubled, growing by 98.7 percent. By comparison, in the past 20 years it has grown by just 18.6 percent.

Mexico’s per capita GDP growth of just 18.6 percent over the past 20 years is about half of the rate of growth achieved by the rest of Latin America.

If NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico’s pre-1980 growth rate–when developmentalist economic policies were the norm–Mexico today would be a relatively high income country, with income per person significantly higher than that of Portugal or Greece. It is unlikely that immigration reform would be a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border.
http://www.cepr.net/documents/nafta-20-years-2014-02.pdf

Mexico wants to be a part of TPP because their government is as corrupt as ours.

coming to the US hoping to make a living. not

… and that is not good for anyone, given the productivity of all and global corporatism, which is quite in the other direction.

The idea of trade agreements and tariffs are so that all boats are lifted, not so many more can joint the bottom. The idea is not, " Now my back isn't hurting as much to support the top 1%, now that your country has given me more of their mutton". That is unsustainable, regardless of what 50 cents a day turns into.

When everybody does better, then everybody does better.

We have a huge complicated economy. How would we know if a trade deal helps or hurts? A million other things are happening. For instance Clinton had about 30 million new jobs after nafta passed. I doubt nafta caused them. I think trade economists would at least have a small bit of understanding of the effects but they have to be largely guessing. So this article says the bad effects of nafta are
clear. But it provides no clear proof. Because one change in a sea of a million changes is not going to provide clear proof of anything. I think it's just religious argument on both sides. Bur Stiglitz opposes the new trade deal and he seems super smart. So I will follow that religious leader on this one. And pray he's right.
'

anniversary..and continues to prove problematic today.

The Broken Promise of Nafta
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published: January 6, 2004



The celebrations of Nafta's 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped. In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to fulfill the most dire warnings of its opponents and the most fervent expectations of its supporters. In Mexico, however, the treaty remains controversial and even harmful -- as do America's efforts to liberalize trade throughout the hemisphere.

There is some good news. In America, the ''giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country'' that Ross Perot predicted never quite materialized. The first six years of Nafta saw unemployment in the United States fall to new lows. (Of course, to most economists there was little basis for Mr. Perot's worries in the first place. Maintaining full employment is the concern of monetary and fiscal policy, not of trade policy.) Nafta has brought some benefits to Mexico as well; it was trade with America, fueled by Nafta -- not the bailout of Wall Street lenders -- that was responsible for Mexico's quick recovery after the financial crisis of December 1994.

But while Mexico benefited in the early days, especially with exports from factories near the United States border, those benefits have waned, both with the weakening of the American economy and intense competition from China. Meanwhile, poor Mexican corn farmers face an uphill battle competing with highly subsidized American corn, while relatively better-off Mexican city dwellers benefit from lower corn prices. And as all but one of Mexico's major banks have been sold to foreign banks, local small- and medium-sized enterprises -- particularly in nonexport sectors like small retail -- worry about access to credit.

Growth in Mexico over the past 10 years has been a bleak 1 percent on a per capita basis -- better than in much of the rest of Latin America, but far poorer than earlier in the century. From 1948 to 1973, Mexico grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent per capita. (By contrast, in the 10 years of Nafta, even with the East Asian crisis, Korean growth averaged 4.3 percent and China's 7 percent in per capita terms.)

And while the hope was that Nafta would reduce income disparities between the United States and its southern neighbor, in fact they have grown -- by 10.6 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, there has been disappointing progress in reducing poverty in Mexico, where real wages have been falling at the rate of 0.2 percent a year.

These outcomes should not have come as a surprise. Nafta does give Mexico a slight advantage over other trading partners. But with its low tax base, low investment in education and technology, and high inequality, Mexico would have a hard time competing with a dynamic China. Nafta enhanced Mexico's ability to supply American manufacturing firms with low-cost parts, but it did not make Mexico into an independently productive economy.

When President Bill Clinton first asked the Council of Economic Advisers about the economic importance of Nafta, early in his administration, our response was that potential geopolitical benefits were far more important than the economic benefits. (Similarly, the European Union, for all of the economic benefits that it has brought, is mainly a political project.)

America perhaps stood more to gain economically than Mexico, but the concrete gains were likely to be small on both sides. Tariff rates on both sides were already very low, with Mexico's tariffs being slightly higher than America's, and Nafta would not eliminate important nontariff barriers. The disparity in income across the Mexican border is among the largest anywhere, and the resulting migration pressure was enormous. Doing what little America could do to enhance growth in Mexico would be good for Mexico, and good for America; and it was the right thing to do for our neighbor to the south.

Unfortunately, much of the goodwill that the United States might have expected has been squandered. First, America attempted to use barriers to keep out Mexican products that began to make inroads in our markets -- from tomatoes to avocados to trucks to brooms. Despite the impressive efforts of workers' rights groups, efforts to ease the life of immigrants have stalled. Recent moves in California to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving driver's licenses and medical care have been a depressing sign that conditions for Mexican immigrants in this country are getting worse.

remainder: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/opinion/the-broken-promise-of-nafta.html

when NAFTA came into effect.

Technically true since the EU involved more than 3 nations but the idea of a "merger of ... nations with such ... different levels of development" was not new in the mid-1990's. Neither was the idea of 'merging' poor and rich countries on the same continent.