The most obvious harm came to American manufacturing jobs. NAFTA did not kill American manufacturing, as is sometimes alleged. Those jobs as a percentage of total nonfarming employment had been declining since the 1950s, and they continued to decline at roughly the same rate after NAFTA. But the treaty did severely affect workers in some parts of the country. A 2016 study coauthored by economists Shushanik Hakobyan of the International Monetary Fund and John McLaren of the University of Virginia concluded that the hardest hit were blue-collar workers in California, Texas, New York, Michigan,
...more
