What We Talk About When We Talk About NAFTA: Elite Discourse, Public Opinion, and the North American Free Trade Agreement

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) exists, or existed, in two forms. One is its actual form, a preferential trade agreement with tangible economic effects. The other is the symbolic form it occupies in the public consciousness. This paper examines the second form, NAFTA the symbol, through both a qualitative analysis of elite discourse and a quantitative analysis of public opinion polling. Through this qualitative analysis, I find that NAFTA was imbued with this symbolic form during the political debate surrounding its passage, when the politicians who criticized it from the left and the right primed the public to hear the word "NAFTA" and, depending on whom they listened to, think of things like "job loss" or "globalization." For many on the right, the agreement also became a vessel for symbolic racism: that is, a way to express racial or nationalist sentiments and a resentment of Mexico. The quantitative analysis offers further evidence that the public sees NAFTA symbolically and shows that this view of the agreement has been consistent over time, as support for foreign trade outpaced support for NAFTA in the years before the agreement was replaced.