NAFTA has brought both negative and positive impacts to Mexico. While NAFTA has increased trade and allowed consumers purchase goods at lower price, it also devastated the manufacturing and agriculture sectors in Mexico. Since the involvement of U.S. and Canadian companies in Mexico, manufacturing industries have adopted technologies that no longer required a vast amount of labor-intensive work. Consequently, industrial centers have been destroyed. A large number of manufacture workers have lost their jobs and needed to look for new employment opportunities. Some of them perceive working in the free-trade zone along the U.S.-Mexico border as an option for escaping poverty. Other jobless workers are attracted by the idea to immigrate to the more economically developed neighbor %u2013 the United States. However, it is not easy or inexpensive for ordinary Mexicans to obtain the proper documentation and authorization for immigration to the United States. In their despair, some Mexicans undergo illegal border crossing.

In addition to manufacture, NAFTA has also drastically impacted domestic agriculture. A great number of small farmers could no longer compete with big American agricultural companies and have been increasingly displaced from the agricultural market (Armadeo, n.d.; Villarreal, 2010). Big U.S. agriculture companies have been heavily subsidies by the U.S. government and been able to produced crops much more efficiently and in larger amounts than Mexican farmers (Amadeo, n.d.). With the production of bulk goods, the prices decreased compared to the higher prices of goods produced by the smaller farmers (Amadeo, n.d.; Villarreal, 2010). As a result of imported cheap crops, food producers and consumers began to purchase from the big companies. This led to an increase in bankruptcy and poverty rate among farmers; for instance, since the inforcement of NAFTA, about 1.3 million farmers%u2019 jobs were lost (Armadeo, n.d.).