NAFTA's opponents attribute much of the displacement caused in the US labor market to the United States’ growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada. According to the EPI, the widening of the deficit has caused the dislocation of domestic production to other countries with cheaper labor and supported the loss of 879,280 US jobs. Critics see the argument of the proponents of NAFTA as being one-sided because they only take into consideration export-oriented job impact instead of looking at the trade balance in aggregate. They argue that increases in imports ultimately displaced the production of goods that would have been made domestically by workers within the United States.
The export-oriented argument is also critiqued because of the discrepancy between domestically-produced exports and exports produced in foreign countries. For example, many US exports are simply being shipped to Mexican maquiladores where they are assembled, and then shipped back to the U.S. as final products. These are not products destined for consumption by Mexicans, yet they made up 61% of exports in 2002. However, only domestically-produced exports are the ones that support U.S. labor. Therefore, the measure of net impact of trade should be calculated using only domestically-produced exports as an indicator of job creation.
78% of the net job losses under NAFTA, 686,700 jobs, were relatively-high paying manufacturing jobs. Certain states with heavy emphasis on manufacturing industries like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California were significantly affected by these job losses.
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