NAFTA and The Fence.

Editor,

NAFTA was hawked as a scheme to reduce poverty in Mexico, but of course, as intended, it made rich investors in Mexico and the USA richer, while subsidized American agricultural goods drove small Mexican farmers and small-farm Mexican laborers off the land, the lucky ones into bottom-dollar exploitation in maquiladoras, the rest into utter desperation.

Now a fence is proposed to lock into Mexico the peasants NAFTA impoverished.

When American workers who have a seat in the lifeboat start to care about someone besides themselves -- namely never -- they will insist on rules regulating international capital flows such that poor people in developing economies are no longer ground into the dirt to put another Rolls Royce in some capitalist's garage.