What are the bad things about NAFTA?

Answer 1

Nafta has: -destroyed many jobs -depressed wages -worsened poverty and inequality -eroded social problems -undermined democracy -enfeebled governments -greatly increased the power and rights of corporations, investors, and property holders

Answer 2

Free trade within the USA, made the USA rich and the same applies to NAFTA. The Hon Justice Jackson of the Supreme Court of the USA (whose views were later vindicated said) summed the matter up in Duckworth v. State of Arkansas, 314 U.S. 390 (1941):-

The extent to which state legislation may be allowed to affect the conduct of interstate business in the absence of Congressional action on the subject has long been a vexatious problem. Recently, the tendency has been to abandon the earlier limitations and to sustain more freely such state laws on the ground that Congress has power to supersede them with regulation of its own. It is a tempting escape from a difficult question to pass to Congress the responsibility for continued existence of local restraints and obstructions to national commerce. But these restraints are individually too petty, too diversified, and too local to get the attention of a Congress hard pressed with more urgent matters. The practical result is that, in default of action by us, they will go on suffocating and retarding and Balkanizing American commerce, trade, and industry.

I differ basically with my brethren as to whether the inertia of government shall be on the side of restraint of commerce or on the side of freedom of commerce. The sluggishness of government, the multitude of matters that clamor for attention, and the relative ease with which men are persuaded to postpone troublesome decisions all make inertia one of the most decisive powers in determining the course of our affairs, and frequently gives to the established order of things a longevity and vitality much beyond its merits. Because that is so, I am reluctant to see any new local systems for restraining our national commerce

Page 314 U. S. 401

get the prestige and power of established institutions. The Court's present opinion and tendency would allow the states to establish the restraints and let commerce struggle for Congressional action to make it free. This trend I am unwilling to further -- in any event, beyond the plain requirements of existing cases.

If the reaction of this Court against what many of us have regarded as an excessive judicial interference with legislative action is to yield wholesome results, we must be cautious lest we merely rush to other extremes. The excessive use for insufficient reason of a judicially inflated due process clause to strike down states' laws regulating their own internal affairs, such as hours of labor in industry, minimum wage requirements, and standards for working conditions, is one thing. To invoke the interstate commerce clause to keep the many states from fastening their several concepts of local "wellbeing" onto the national commerce is a wholly different thing.

Our national free intercourse is never in danger of being suddenly stifled by dramatic and sweeping acts of restraint. That would produce its own antidote. Our danger, as the forefathers well knew, is from the aggregate strangling effect of a multiplicity of individually petty and diverse and local regulations. Each may serve some local purpose worthy enough by itself. Congress may very properly take into consideration local policies and dangers when it exercises its power under the commerce clause. But to let each locality conjure up its own dangers and be the judge of the remedial restraints to be clamped onto interstate trade inevitably retards our national economy and disintegrates our national society. It is the movement and exchange of goods that sustain living standards both of him who produces and of him who consumes. This vital national interest in free commerce among the states must not be jeopardized.

Answer 3

some people oppose the NAFTA because it encouraged a number of the U.S. manufacturers to move their operations to Mexico.

Answer 4

I wish I knew :)

Answer 5

nothing