Shannon had heard that time and time again: Mexicans worked for less. That was their main sin. “They do it cheaper,” she told me. “They are a lot better workers. That’s because they don’t have that opportunity where they are from.” To many steelworkers, that fact marked the final broken promise of NAFTA. The treaty had not stopped the flow of illegal immigration; instead, undocumented immigrants had moved in unprecedented numbers to low-cost states that hadn’t seen much Mexican immigration before.
