NAFTA sows discord on the right - North American Free Trade Agreement

George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni has written that "able-bodied spies and terrorists may cross the Rio Grande at least with the same ease as maids seeking household work in the north." NAFTA critics argue that even now, less than 10 percent of vehicles crossing the border are inspected and that the situation would grow worse if the treaty takes effect.

So, too, with illegal narcotics -- "really the Achilles' heel of NAFTA," says Copulos. He cites the estimate of William von Raab, a former customs commissioner, that as much as 70 percent of illegal narcotics smuggled into this country come across the Mexican border. Critics believe that NAFTA, once fully implemented, would give drug kingpins increased opportunities to move drugs north, since Mexican trucking firms would have free access to all of North America.

"That is hilarious as an argument," says Gigot. "NAFTA is about tariffs and goods," not regulating or stemming the flow of people, who are going to keep on coming no matter what treaties are signed.

Cato's Carpenter says terrorism is "another red herring being pulled across NAFTA's path." Drugs will move across the border "with or without NAFTA," he says. And libertarian writer James Bovard has argued that, since the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Customs Service intercept only about 10 percent of incoming narcotics, "it is hard to believe that NAFTA could make the drug trade much worse."

As for immigration, supporters contend that NAFTA would actually decrease it by raising the Mexican standard of living. But Copulos is skeptical. In nonindustrialized countries such as Mexico, where there's "a fairly high level of barter" in the economy, "money wages take on a disproportionate value," he says. Arguing that ordinary Mexicans are desperate, Copulos says the minimum wage there is barely enough to feed one person -- "essentially starvation wages" -- and the average Mexican family consists of five people. Mexicans "are going to look elsewhere, and nothing that's going to happen under NAFTA will change that."

The heretical notion that capitalism won't help alleviate this situation astonishes some conservatives. "We believe in free trade," says James Courter, a former New Jersey congressman and now chairman of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. "We believe in reduced barriers. We believe in immigration. We believe in the fact that immigrants have been one of the greatest natural resources we have in this country. So it's very discouraging to me to see the number of conservatives who are well-known advocating isolationism."

But Copulos says he's discouraged that some conservatives who "would bridle if they were approached by a hostile foreign power to take some act that would undermine the country's national security in a military sense" will "willingly sell themselves on the altar of greater profits to foreign powers whose economic actions have consequences that are just as severe."

Regardless of who prevails in the NAFTA dispute, the warfare over issues of sovereignty and nationalism is more evidence of the divisions within American conservatism. Historian Eugene Genovese has suggested that the traditional left/right dichotomy is being transformed into a split between populist nationalists on one side and free market internationalists on the other.