The Bush and Salinas families both had multigenerational plans for greater integration between Mexico and the U.S., but neither quite came off as expected.
Steve Sailer
Feb 12, 2024
NAFTA may seem like the kind of tedious policy wonkery that only a Matthew Yglesias can find fascinating, but it comes entangled with fascinating human interest stories.
There were, of course, the American workers who lost their jobs due to Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound,” although it strikes me that the real economic disaster turned out to be America’s leadership class assuming NAFTA was less a prudent example of “continentalism” limited to our two land neighbors and more a proof that “globalism” would work with our natural archrival China, a potential industrial superpower.
And then there were the millions of Mexican peasants driven from the land where their ancestors had grown corn for 5,000 years by the first Bush administration’s insistence on maximizing the profits of Nebraska agribusiness, even though it was known that many poor peons would wind up illegally immigrating to the United States, with long-term consequences that still remain uncertain.
But I will focus instead on the family tales of three NAFTA dynasties at the absolute opposite end of the social scale: Salinas, Slim, and Bush.