Today’s U.S.-Canada-Mexico summit in Ottawa will see a shift in focus in the wake of the Brexit vote across the pond. The so-called “Three Amigos” summit among the three NAFTA members was supposed to focus on the usual globalist laundry list of agenda items, such as reducing carbon emissions and ensuring the passage of the contentious TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), which has so far been ratified by none of the three governments. In a word, business as usual for NAFTA, which, after successfully selling itself as a free trade agreement to secure ratification in the United States two decades ago, has spent most of its time enacting new transnational regulations, whittling away at sovereign border controls, and, in general, setting the stage for an international political bloc such as the EU — just as its founders intended it to. But now, with the crippling blow dealt to the EU by the Brexit vote, NAFTA leaders are scrambling to reorder their priorities.
Particularly concerned with the turn of events across the Atlantic is Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose impoverished, crime-ridden, terminally socialist country has long benefitted economically from membership in NAFTA — at the expense of its two northern partners. For 20 years, American and Canadian corporations have been moving manufacturing south of the Rio Grande to take advantage of Mexico’s much lower wages and labor standards. Laxer border standards, meanwhile, have been an unalloyed boon to millions of Mexicans willing to enter the United States (and, increasingly, Canada) illegally to work and send the proceeds back to the cash-strapped motherland.
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