Building Treaties Instead of Walls: How NAFTA and the USMCA Make the Case for Treaties as the Future of U.S. Immigration Policy

Comment by Audrey E. Martin

Twenty-seven years after NAFTA, the United States enacted the USMCA, an agreement with Mexico and Canada designed to bring trade policy between the three North American nations into the twenty-first century. However, the USMCA fails in large part to update relevant immigration regulations, with those provisions a near copy-and-paste from NAFTA. This Comment analyzes how that approach squares with migration in a modern, globalized economy, contextualized by a discussion of U.S. immigration policy with Mexico. This Comment then explores how the European Union has addressed labor migration via treaty before turning to how that treaty-based approach may serve as an example for the United States, both to legalize longstanding immigration patterns and to acknowledge the needs of its own economy.


About the Author

Audrey E. Martin. J.D. candidate 2021, Tulane University Law School; B.A. 2018, Louisiana State University.

Citation

95 Tul. L. Rev. 387 (2021)