NAFTA & Political Economy of Immigration http://alainet.org/active/39661&lang=es

International migration is not, strictly speaking, a new phenomenon. However, in recent decades, the ascendancy of the global economy and the (short-lived?) triumph of neoliberal economics produced a parallel ascendancy in the rate of international immigration. Specifically, in Mexico the effects of neoliberal structural-adjustment programs in the 1980s, NAFTA in the 1990s, and the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership have produced successive waves of Mexican migrants to the United States.  

As trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally joined in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development was created to study the causes of immigration to the United States and to offer advice on how to filter and contain it. The commission's first report to President Bush in 1990 found that the primary motivation for migrating north was economic.