But NAFTA critics say:

— While Americans who provide services to NAFTA partners are running a surplus, the goods trade deficit totaled $95 billion in 2010.

— Some states have lost a lot of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, particularly Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. The Economic Policy Institute, a research group supported by unions, released a report in 2011 saying U.S. workers have seen nearly 700,000 jobs go to Mexican competitors.

— A lot of the NAFTA-driven business in Mexico took the form of factories along the border, but the jobs haven't been great ones for the workers. Intense competition with Asian and Indian workers may have depressed wage gains for Mexicans.

— The surge in imported food has strained U.S. food inspectors, potentially increasing risks for U.S. consumers.

— Critics say that by disrupting the previously protected small-scale agriculture sector in Mexico, NAFTA caused a surge in illegal immigration into the U.S.

Also see~
NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Clinton Global Initiative
Posted: 06/24/2014 11:39 am EDT

President Bill Clinton estimated the creation of 200,000 U.S. jobs within two years, and 1 million within five years, based on a projected export boom to Mexico. Twenty years after Clinton signed NAFTA into law, Global Trade Watch reports a 450 percent increase in the U.S. trade deficit, resulting in the export of almost one million jobs, and downward pressure on wages.

In fact, the average annual U.S. agricultural trade deficit with Mexico and Canada ballooned to almost three times the pre-NAFTA level, to $975 million within two decades of NAFTA's passage, eliminating an estimated one million net U.S. jobs by 2004, reports the Economic Policy Institute. As U.S. food processors moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages, U.S. food imports soared. Public Citizen has tallied in a comprehensive report the promises by U.S. corporations to create specific numbers of jobs if NAFTA passed, and the consequent record of many of the same firms who relocated jobs to Mexico and Canada.

The export of subsidized U.S. corn did increase over NAFTA's first decade, decimating the livelihoods of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers plus an additional 1.4 million agricultural workers, triggering mass dislocation, wage depression and a doubling of Mexican immigration to the United States.

Observed Bill Moyers recently, "The post-NAFTA era has been marked by growing inequality, declining job security and new leverage for corporations to attack government regulations enacted in the public interest." ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-swenson/nafta-the-transpacific-clinton_b_5523327.html