But the autoworkers’ animosity is aiming at the wrong target. There are still more than 800,000 jobs in the American auto sector. And there is a good case to be made that without Nafta, there might not be much left of Detroit at all.
.. “Without the ability to move lower-wage jobs to Mexico we would have lost the whole industry,” said Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, who has been studying the impact of Nafta on industries and workers since its inception more than two decades ago.
.. The industry lost 350,000 jobs, or about a third of its workers, over the period.
..The surge of Mexican exports in the 1990s was propelled by a sharp devaluation of the peso, which set off the so-called Tequila Crisis. The wave of immigration from Mexico into the United States, which lasted until 2005, was driven by a decline in government subsidies to farmers and an economic collapse that occurred just as millions of young Mexicans were entering their late teens and were desperate for jobs.
.. The truth is that autoworkers in Detroit were not just competing with cheap workers in Mexico. They were also competing with American workers in the union-averse South, where many car companies set up shop. They were competing with robots and more efficient Japanese and Korean automakers.
.. The Honda CR-V assembled in El Salto, Jalisco, for example, uses an American-made motor and transmission. Roughly 70 percent of its content is either American or Canadian, according to government statistics.
.. And if the real concern is China — another target of Mr. Trump’s ire — a truly integrated North American market would help keep it at bay.
..“It’s exactly the wrong time to blow up Nafta,” Professor Hanson argued. “We would be doing China an enormous favor.”