Giving Compass' Take:

• The New Food Economy reports on the devastating effects NAFTA has had on corn farmers in Mexico, how it relates to immigration and the uncertain future that lies ahead.

• When it comes to immigration, we are so focused on immediate crises (and the heated debates surround them) that policymakers often overlook the root causes for migration and economic depressions. It's worth examining how support for farmers to retain their livelihoods could solve a lot of problems.

• It's also worth a reminder of the 5 ways immigration actually enhances a country’s culture.

In 1993, then-President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law. It marked the first time a trade agreement had been negotiated between two developed nations — the United States and Canada — and an emerging-market country, Mexico. Its original aim was to expand trade and make these three countries more competitive globally. But NAFTA’s various pros and cons have since become hotly contested political talking points centered around some familiar narratives: job-exporting versus job-importing; lower wages versus cheap gas and cheap food; economic growth versus farmer exploitation.

In February of 2017, President Trump told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland that NAFTA is “one of the worst deals ever made by any country having to do with economic development. It’s economic undevelopment as far as our country is concerned.” Economists and trade experts on both sides of the southern U.S. border disagree about the economic impacts. But smallholder maize farmers in Mexico tend to agree with Trump, at least on this point.

Cheap, commodity corn has been disastrous for Mexican heirloom corn producers.

Since 1994, when NAFTA officially went into effect and opened economic borders between the two countries (and Canada), trade between the U.S. and Mexico has tripled in both directions, mostly in the form of machinery and vehicles. In 2017, agriculture accounted for roughly 8 percent of the total goods and services the U.S. imported from ($243 billion) and exported to ($314 billion) Mexico. Our southern neighbor stocks the fresh produce sections of our grocery stores, and we send them in return 6 million tons of subsidized corn annually.

Read the full article on the impacts of the corn industry by Renée Alexander at The New Food Economy.