ABSTRACT
I stressed in Chapter 1 the tight integration of the US and LAC economies and that immigrants are profoundly shaping US society and culture. These are themes that are not only good to think about; they are also important in the everyday lives of many people and the focus of rancorous debates in the US on the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and the causes and consequences of illegal immigration. In its Principles of Professional Responsibility, the American Anthropological Association states that “Anthropology … is an irreducibly social enterprise. Among our goals are the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems” (American Anthropological Association 2012). It is with this spirit of an engaged anthropology (Beck and Maida 2013; Sillitoe 2016) that in this chapter I focus on the twin and related controversies of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and legal and illegal immigration to the US. In the first section I delve into the ideology and practice of neoliberalism, which has provided the mainstay of free trade policies. I then turn to the promises and some of the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the third section I shift to the bitter immigration debates in the US.
