Trade Agreement Deficits

Now is not the time to pull back on NAFTA

By Ruben Navarrette, Jr.

It’s an election year, and so for Democrats, whether they’re in Congress or running for president, it’s open season on the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Sorry NAFTA. It’s not personal; it’s just politics. Organized labor calls the shots, and there are a lot of union members—particularly in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—who have convinced themselves that the reason they’re struggling is because of an abundance of trade deals and foreign competition. These are the sort of folks who don’t mind surrendering control over their destiny to forces beyond their control.
It’s the geography. How you feel about NAFTA has a lot to do with where you live. In the 15 years since President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, I’ve lived in three states that were NAFTA-friendly—California, Arizona, and Texas. All were full of businesses that do lots of trading with Mexico and Canada and consumers that benefited from having access to new markets and new products.
And so I have trouble understanding the thinking of those who live in more economically depressed states and who believe it’s government’s job to provide and protect—to provide people with well-paying/low-effort jobs and protect the jobs they already have.
Apparently, there are at least two people who understand this convoluted way of thinking: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, each of whom is trying to win the Democratic nomination for president by depicting the opponent as (gasp!) supportive of free trade.
While campaigning in Ohio, both candidates got so carried away in pursuit of blue-collar voters that they actually promised, if elected, to give our NAFTA partners—Canada and Mexico—an ultimatum: Either agree to revise the trade deal or the United States will pull out.
That’s nuts. It would set a terrible precedent for all sorts of future agreements that the United States might want to sign with other countries, and further erode our international credibility.
Democrats are always saying how, in foreign policy, President Bush has practiced cowboy diplomacy. Well, on trade policy, it’s the Democrats who have developed the swagger.
On immigration policy, it is Republicans who spread fear and misinformation to demagogue the issue in pursuit of political goals. But on trade, it’s Democrats who play that game.
Just look at the U.S. Senate, where Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) is leading the charge to unravel the legal requirement that Mexican trucks be granted access to U.S. roadways under NAFTA.
Why? It’s because Dorgan is doing the bidding of the Teamsters Union, which is determined to keep Mexican trucks off the roads.
First, the Teamster bosses said Mexican trucks were a safety hazard because they were constantly in need of repair. Then they said it was actually the Mexican truck drivers who posed the safety risk because of their poor driving records. Then they said that, actually, the bigger worry was that these truck drivers would never pass drug tests or meet other requirements. None of that turned out to be true.
Now Democrats are channeling Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan and resorting to xenophobia. In a Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing in March, Sen. Dorgan badgered U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters over whether Mexican truck drivers in a pilot program had enough proficiency in English to read U.S. highway signs. The job of testing the drivers’ proficiency in English at the border lies with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And Dorgan seemed to insist at the hearing that any driver who preferred to answer FMCSA’s questions in Spanish couldn’t understand roadway signs in English.
So that means U.S. motorists traveling to Mexico can’t be considered proficient in Spanish if they prefer to communicate in English, or that it’s not enough to know that alto means stop, but that we should be able to read Cervantes in its original language?
And this nonsense is coming from Democrats. Shouldn’t the liberal position on trade be that the largely unrestricted flow of goods across borders aids the development of poor countries and that, without it, the United States, with such a small percentage of the world’s population, would continue to control almost all its wealth?
That’s not a bad argument. But there’s one I like better. It’s based on personal responsibility. It goes like this: Competition is an essential and beneficial part of life, and it’s not the job of government to protect you from it by pulling up drawbridges and pulling out of trade deals. We’re a better country than that, and it’s time we started acting like it. If you’re tired of being outgunned, outbid, and outworked by the low-skilled, either work harder or go off and get more skills.
I don’t suppose that bit of common sense will find its way into the Democratic Party platform. And isn’t that a shame?

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, and a regular contributor of commentary to CNN.com and USA TODAY.