NAFTA and Lost Jobs in the U.S.

Sidney Weintraub’s “Three Years Later, NAFTA Proves the Naysayers Wrong” (Opinion, March 2), is an eloquent perversion of the facts surrounding the North American Free Trade Agreement. Supporters of NAFTA assured the American people that it would accomplish certain objectives. Among these was the generation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the U.S. through the creation and maintenance of positive trade balances with our trading partners (Canada and Mexico).

Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the United States has run up trade deficits with Mexico and Canada of $32.2 billion and $59.5 billion respectively. The significance of these trade deficits is a loss of 1,838,000 manufacturing jobs in this country.

From the end of World War II until 1986, the U.S. went from employing half of its work force in manufacturing down to 26%. From 1986 until today, just 10 years later, only 13% of America’s work force is engaged in manufacturing. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to extrapolate that at this rate, the U.S. will have no one working in the manufacturing sector in another 10 years. The significance is that then the U.S. will no longer be a world power.

ROBERT C. PIKE

Montrose