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 Editorials | Issues | November 2007 
The Conspiratorial Urban Legend of the Evil NAFTA Superhighway
 Clay Risen - World Trade Magazine
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Click image to enlarge | | Asserted CNN host Lou Dobbs last year, “The Bush White House, supported by corporate America and special interests, [is] building a superhighway dividing this country, a superhighway that will run between Mexico and Canada.” |
The questions surprised even a presidential candidate as poised as Mitt Romney. A bespectacled, matronly woman at the back of the audience in Story City, Iowa, had heard news about an enormous highway being built between across the Midwest, linking Mexico and Canada.
“You can find it on the Internet, a Security and Prosperity Partnership that’s been working for a while to join the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and part of it is a NAFTA superhighway,” she explained.
She rejected Romney’s dismissal that the story was make-believe. “I don’t think they’re talking about it,” she retorted. Rather than argue, he offered a vague promise - “if they are building it, I’ll stop it” - and quickly took another question.
The “superhighway question” recurred often on the GOP campaign trail. Rudy Giuliani got it in Concord, New Hampshire. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, John McCain was asked what he knew about secret plans for a highway “to unite the three nations together.”
According to libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, a conservative Republican Congressman from Texas running for president (and a firm opponent of the superhighway), the plans to link Mexico, the United States and Canada by a monster highway will be the sleeper issue of the 2008 election. The Concord Monitor (New Hampshire) agrees: “The road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy.”
Reality is there’s no such highway in the works. “The U.S. government is not planning a NAFTA Super Highway,” reads a Commerce Department web page. “The U.S. government does not have the authority to designate any highway as a NAFTA Superhighway, nor has it sought such authority, nor is it planning to seek such authority.”
But that inconvenient fact hasn’t quelled populist unrest.
Riding well below the mainstream media’s radar, the highway is just one of the many real and imagined cross-border programs - the Security and Prosperity Partnership (real), the North American Union (imagined), the “amero” currency (also imagined) - to draw the attention of conspiracy-theory mongers over the past year. It is all over the right-wing blogosphere. And, it is the reigning issue in newsletters put out by fringe groups like the John Birch Society.
Asserted CNN host Lou Dobbs last year, “The Bush White House, supported by corporate America and special interests, [is] building a superhighway dividing this country, a superhighway that will run between Mexico and Canada.”
Politicians are stoking the flames. In January, Virginia GOP Rep. Virgil Goode introduced a bill - which quickly gained 27 co-sponsors - “expressing the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada.” Nor is this a partisan issue: In July the House approved, by an overwhelming 362-63 vote, a ban on funding for a “NAFTA superhighway.”
Most recently, Goode joined 21 fellow representatives in a letter to President George W. Bush warning of “serious and growing concern in the U.S. Congress about the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership.”
Bush, speaking at a meeting with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts, laughed it off. “I’m amused by the difference between what actually takes place in the meetings and by what some are trying to say takes place,” he said. “It’s quite comical actually, to realize the difference between reality and what some people on TV are talking about.”
Such talk would be comical - superstates, evil corporations, a continental currency - if it weren’t also a potential threat to trade and economic growth. Tri-national trade has reached $700 billion annually, with the value of goods moving through the Laredo, Texas border crossing alone exceeding that of all goods coming from Great Britain. Economists predict those numbers will increase dramatically as U.S.-bound shipping moves from overburdened American ports to new and upgraded destinations along the Mexican and Canadian Pacific coasts.
Indeed, tri-national trade has tripled since the signing of NAFTA, but cross-border infrastructure spending has been nearly flat. “The entire U.S. economy is going to be more and more dependent on the strength of its multimodal system,” says Frank Conde, spokesman for the North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO), an infrastructure advocacy group. That means more efficient border crossings, regulatory harmonization, and bigger and better infrastructure projects, which will take significant political and fiscal commitment at all levels of government.
So while it’s one thing for blogs and newsletters to hype the latest conspiracy theory, it’s a serious concern when politicians start listening, and advocate legislation to block needed government investments. “Everything they say about an NAU, the SPP, and a NAFTA superhighway are falsehoods,” says Conde. “The confusion caused by organizations like that harms our ability to improve trade links.”
At the precise moment when we need to be moving forward as quickly as possible on international infrastructure, the conspiracy theorists are threatening to push us backward.
This latest surge in conspiracy theorizing draws on a long-running thread in American culture.
“Historically, there has always been a feeling among some in the United States that we could be more secure and prosperous if we separated ourselves from the world,” notes Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University.
Conspiracy theory mongering around NAFTA has been churning since President Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1993, with the John Birch Society and other far-right groups declaring it a threat to American sovereignty and jobs. But a variety of trends have combined to both ramp up the volume and spread it closer to the mainstream.
The most obvious factor is a general turning away from free trade on both the right and the left. Populist politicians in both parties have lashed out at international trade deals as the product of undemocratic plutocrats and their allies in the federal government.
After her anti-superhighway bill passed in July, Ohio’s Mary Kaptur declared “a victory for openness in trade negotiations, highway safety, good wages, and fair trade policies. The grip of global corporations was loosened last night.”
As conservative commentator Phyllis Schlafly wrote in a recent syndicated column, “Now that the game plan is laid out, we can connect the dots: the North American Free Trade Agreement; the admission of Mexican trucks onto U.S. highways; the contract to build the TransTexas Corridor and the plans to extend it into a NAFTA Superhighway; making Kansas City an international ‘port’; the ‘totalization’ of illegal immigrants into the U.S. Social Security system; and the recently defeated Senate amnesty bill.”
Ironically, many free trade advocates say that when you look at the actual state of cross-border cooperation, the problem is not that we’re doing too much. It’s that we’re not doing enough.
Take the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), an ongoing dialogue begun in 2005 and designed to coordinate cross-border regulatory and security policies.
While conspiracy theorists depict the SPP as a way to weaken American laws, in fact it has no authority to make any changes one way or another to the regulatory regime. “The SPP conforms with existing laws,” says David Bohigan, assistant secretary of commerce for market access and compliance. Instead, he says, the goal is to harmonize existing laws and regulations between countries.
Think of it as a matter of translation: Far from forcing everyone to learn Spanish, the SPP is like a Spanish-to-English dictionary, allowing English speakers to understand their neighbors without ditching their own language. A typical initiative under the framework calls for the three nations to “develop a common approach to standardize the regulatory measures taken in response to Phakopsora pachyrizi (soybean rust).” If this is a conspiracy theory, it’s hardly the stuff of aliens and x-files.
The SPP actually has a number of critics on the other side, people who say it does not go far enough in establishing a framework for discussion. “If there is anything wrong with the SPP, it is not secrecy, but the fact that it is a mishmash of disconnected and mostly trivial initiatives, lacking any organizing vision or direction,” wrote Roland Paris, a former Canadian foreign policy adviser, in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
“The SPP is an important initiative,” says Pastor. “My fear is that it is too timid and too fearful of criticism from the right.”
Wholly separate from the SPP are efforts to expand the transportation infrastructure that carries goods into and around the country. Rather than links in a conspiratorial plot, in fact they are uncoordinated, unrealized, and in most cases unlikely to be built.
First, there is North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, a Dallas-based nonprofit. Despite its imposing name, NASCO is nothing more than an advocacy group for better use of current trade corridors, in particular the routes running from Mexico to Canada. “What we’re trying to do is push both the private sector and the public sector to maximize the efficiency and security of the existing transportation infrastructure,” says NASCO’s Conde.
Even NASCO admits that improving the efficiency of existing corridors is hardly a solution for the long term. Between now and 2025, Texas alone will see a 132 percent increase in traffic, with 260,465 trucks using its highways every day. In response, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been pushing for what comes closest to an actual NAFTA superhighway: a new, 1,200-foot-wide toll road running from the Mexican border to Oklahoma, the centerpiece in a collection of projects known as the TransTexas Corridor (TTC).
Because the highway, estimated to take $180 billion and 50 years to build, would cut through numerous Texas communities and displace up to one million residents, the plan has drawn a fusillade of public criticism, particularly from farmers who stand to lose valuable land to the project.
Handing over infrastructure management to the foreign private sector is nothing new - French firms run numerous American water districts, and an Australian-Spanish joint venture manages the Chicago Skyway. Nevertheless, the possible role of foreign business in the TTC’s construction and operation has given an added twist to fears of a NAFTA superhighway.
Such opposition has already throttled Perry’s momentum toward approving the TTC, and observers say it looks increasingly unlikely that the project will get built.
The controversy over the “superhighway,” the SPP, the TTC and other efforts exposes a harsh truth about the future of the American economy. While free trade agreements and World Trade Organization negotiations are vital, the means by which trade actually occurs - or, increasingly, is impeded - are the everyday pieces of the continental transportation infrastructure: highways, rails, port terminals, and regulations.
And, while the United States has maintained a global leadership on writing and expanding trade deals, it has done a poor job of expanding its infrastructure to meet the demands of the resulting increases in cross-border trade.
All of which means that the more the conspiracy theorists on the Internet, in the media, and in government frame the issue on their terms, the less the country will be able to make the sorts of investments necessary to assure its long-term growth - and therefore the long-term prosperity of the continent, and the world. |
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