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[Page H5591]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LET'S PUT SOME JUSTICE IN TRADE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from
Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) for 5 minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, America's workers do not support the Trump-
negotiated NAFTA-2 trade deal.
Just like the original NAFTA, the new NAFTA is half-baked,
repackaged, and broken. It was not written to improve the lives of our
working families in Ohio or in Mexico or in Central America. It was
written to advance transnational corporate interests and the schemes of
very wealthy elites.
In a country whose public and private sectors too often serve the
interests of the rich and powerful and not the average person, this is
the last thing the working people of Ohio and North America need,
regardless of whether they work in the mills or toil in the fields.
The President's promise of higher wages and returning jobs is not to
be believed. NAFTA cannot deliver for the working people unless it
ensures the dignity of labor, of labor rights, and labor enforcement on
this continent.
Our leaders must wake up to the human suffering these trade deals
create, not only for our own citizens as their jobs are outsourced but,
also, people who are exploited in Mexico and the Americas.
When transnational corporations crash together the economies of
first- and third-world countries, without a second thought about the
consequences, it is the working people who get crushed.
The ravages of NAFTA inflicted on the Americas and their workers are
etched across America's communities. Far too many have been devastated
by the outsourcing of factories, many left in economic ruin.
NAFTA was sold as the model of the modern integration of first-world
and emerging-world economies. It was then replicated in Central America
with the so-called CAFTA sweatshop deal, covering nations from which
millions are now fleeing to our border.
When multinational corporate interests dominate negotiations and
place a heavy thumb on the scales of economic justice for labor across
the Americas, trade with our closest neighbors is never a zero-sum game
because too few control the levers of negotiating power.
It is no surprise that nearly a half a million migrants have been
taken into custody at our southern border this year alone--half a
million.
In the past, undocumented immigrants were overwhelmingly single men
from Mexico, but that flow has changed. First, we experienced
immigration from Mexico post NAFTA. There was a hemorrhage.
That has gone down in recent years, but now CAFTA, the gift of CAFTA,
sees Central American families having become the new face of
undocumented immigration.
These landless people, jobless people from the Americas live in fear.
As America exports our transnational-driven trade models, we
knowingly rely upon the human suffering our economic policies inflict
on the poor.
NAFTA and NAFTA-2 were always about cheap labor and bringing down the
benefits of health and pension benefits for American workers.
Undocumented migrants arrive brutalized through trafficking channels.
Indeed, one can easily see, in agriculture alone in the Americas, the
exploitative model of slavery has simply morphed into a new serfdom
under the present system.
Once in the United States, many become undocumented farm workers, and
the Department of Agriculture estimates that about half of our Nation's
farm workers are unauthorized, undocumented.
These workers face great hostility and black-market labor conditions
repugnant to our values. This undocumented status makes workers
especially vulnerable to abuse.
Is the answer to expand our migrant visa worker programs, the H-2A or
H-2B visas? Absolutely not.
Take the tragedy of Santiago Cruz, a Mexican labor recruiter brutally
murdered in a legal labor recruitment office in Monterrey, Mexico.
Santiago was communicating to his fellow Mexican workers who sought
economic opportunity in America that they did not have to pay a coyote
$8,000 to get across the border--a crooked, lone coyote.
Twelve years after his death near the Mexican-U.S. border, Mexico has
not prosecuted his murderer and our country has not raised a voice to
get justice in his murder.
But the greatest injustice is the new NAFTA deal that fails to
address the cancer of undocumented labor in the Americas, especially in
the agriculture industry.
The current migrant worker system is widely abused by employers
seeking a captive workforce. NAFTA-2 must include a comprehensive
strategy to address continental labor, and agricultural immigration
must be a part and central to it, not absent.
The continental enforcement of healthy working conditions and
integration of enforceable labor laws must be central to NAFTA-2. It is
not in it.
That is the ugly exploitation of America's industrialized and farm
workers that we allow to continue.
How morally reprehensible is this?
I ask my colleagues to please take a look at our bill and include a
labor secretariat in the new NAFTA deal. Let's put some justice in
trade.
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