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Bill
Clinton's Speech At The Signing Ceremony For the North
American Free Trade Agreement -September 14, 1993 |
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Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, President Bush,
President Carter, President Ford, ladies and gentlemen. I would
like to acknowledge just a couple of other people who are in the
audience because I think they deserve to be seen by America
since you’ll be seeing a lot more of them: my good friend Bill
Daley from Chicago and former Congressman Bill Frenzel from
Minnesota, who have agreed to lead this fight for our
administration on a bipartisan basis. Would you please stand and
be recognized.
It's an honor for me today to be joined by my predecessor,
President Bush, who took the major steps in negotiating this
North American Free Trade Agreement; President Jimmy Carter,
whose vision of hemispheric development gives great energy to
our efforts and has been a consistent theme of his many, many
years now; and President Ford, who has argued as fiercely for
expanded trade and for this agreement as any American citizen
and whose counsel I continue to value. These men, differing in
party and outlook, join us today because we all recognize the
important stakes for our Nation in this issue.
Yesterday we saw the sight of an old world dying, a new one
being born in hope and a spirit of peace. Peoples who for a
decade were caught in the cycle of war and frustration chose
hope over fear and took a great risk to make the future better.
Today we turn to face the challenge of our own hemisphere, our
own country, our own economic fortunes. In a few moments, I will
sign three agreements that will complete our negotiations with
Mexico and Canada to create a North American Free Trade
Agreement. In the coming months I will submit this pact to
Congress for approval. It will be a hard fight, and I expect to
be there with all of you every step of the way. We will make our
case as hard and as well as we can. And though the fight will be
difficult, I deeply believe we will win. And I'd like to tell
you why. First of all, because NAFTA means jobs, American jobs
and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I
wouldn't support this agreement.
As President, it is my duty to speak frankly to the American
people about the world in which we now live. Fifty years ago at
the end of World War II, an unchallenged America was protected
by the oceans and by our technological superiority and, very
frankly, by the economic devastation of the people who could
otherwise have been our competitors. We chose then to try to
help rebuild our former enemies and to create a world of free
trade supported by institutions which would facilitate it. As a
result of that effort, global trade grew from $200 billion in
1950 to $800 billion in 1980. As a result, jobs were created and
opportunity thrived all across the world. But make no mistake
about it, our decision at the end of World War II to create a
system of global, expanded, freer trade, and the supporting
institutions, played a major role in creating the prosperity of
the American middle class.
Ours is now an era in which commerce is global and in which
money, management, technology are highly mobile. For the last 20
years, in all the wealthy countries of the world, because of
changes in the global environment, because of the growth of
technology, because of increasing competition, the middle class
that was created and enlarged by the wise policies of expanding
trade at the end of World War II has been under severe stress.
Most Americans are working harder for less. They are vulnerable
to the fear tactics and the averseness to change that is behind
much of the opposition to NAFTA.
But I want to say to my fellow Americans, when you live in a
time of change the only way to recover your security and to
broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change, to embrace it,
to move forward. Nothing we do, nothing we do in this great
capital can change the fact that factories or information can
flash across the world, that people can move money around in the
blink of an eye. Nothing can change the fact that technology can
be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and
then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who
have a little different take on the way the technology works.
For two decades, the winds of global competition have made these
things clear to any American with eyes to see. The only way we
can recover the fortunes of the middle class in this country so
that people who work harder and smarter can at least prosper
more, the only way we can pass on the American dream of' the
last 40 years to our children and their children for the next 40
is to adapt to the changes which are occurring.
In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate
about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs
of tomorrow, or try to resist these changes, hoping we can
preserve the economic structures of yesterday. I tell you, my
fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse
of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern
Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the
winds of change that economics and technology and information
flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option.
Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create
the jobs of tomorrow.
I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the
first 2 years of its effect. I believe if you look at the
trends--and President Bush and I were talking about it this
morning--starting about the time he was elected President, over
one-third of our economic growth and in some years over one half
of our net new jobs came directly from exports. And on average,
those exports-related jobs paid much higher than jobs that had
no connection to exports. I believe that NAFTA will create a
million jobs in the first 5 years of its impact. And I believe
that that is many more jobs than will be lost, as inevitably
some will be, as always happens when you open up the mix to a
new range of competition.
NAFTA will generate these jobs by fostering an export boom to
Mexico, by tearing down tariff walls which have been lowered
quite a bit by the present administration of President Salinas
but are still higher than Americas'. Already Mexican consumers
buy more per capita from the United States than other consumers
in other nations. Most Americans don't know this but the average
Mexican citizen, even though wages are much lower in Mexico, the
average Mexican citizen is now spending $450 per year per person
to buy American goods. That is more than the average Japanese,
the average German, or the average Canadian buys; more than the
average German, Swiss, and Italian citizens put together.
So when people say that this trade agreement is just about how
to move jobs to Mexico so nobody can make a living, how do they
explain the fact that Mexicans keep buying more products made in
America every year? Go out and tell the American people that.
Mexican citizens with lower incomes spend more money--real
dollars, not percentage of their income--more money on American
products than Germans, Japanese, Canadians. That is a fact. And
there will be more if they have more money to spend. That is
what expanding trade is all about.
In 1987, Mexico exported $5.7 billion more of products to the
United States than they purchased from us. We had a trade
deficit. Because of the free market, tariff'-lowering policies
of the Salinas government in Mexico, and because our people are
becoming more export-oriented, that $5.7 billion trade deficit
has been turned into a $5.4 billion trade surplus for the United
States. It has created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Even when you subtract the jobs that have moved into the
maquilladora areas, America is a net job winner in what has
happened in trade in the last 6 years. When Mexico boosts its
consumption of petroleum products in Louisiana--where we're
going tomorrow to talk about NAFTA--as it did by about 200
percent in that period, Louisiana refinery workers gained job
security. When Mexico purchased industrial machinery and
computer equipment made in Illinois, that means more jobs. And
guess what? In this same period, Mexico increased those
purchases out of Illinois by 300 percent.
Forty-eight out of the 50 States have boosted exports to Mexico
since 1987. That's one reason why 41 of our Nation's 50
Governors - some of them who are here today, and I thank them
for their presence - support this trade pact. I can tell you, if
you're a Governor, people won't leave you in office unless they
think you get up every day trying to create more jobs. They
think that's what your job is if you're a Governor. And the
people who have the job of creating jobs for their State and
working with their business community, working with their labor
community, 41 out of the 50 have already embraced the NAFTA
pact.
Many Americans are still worried that this agreement will move
jobs south of the border because they've seen jobs move south of
the border and because they know that there are still great
differences in the wage rates. There have been 19 serious
economic studies of NAFTA by liberals and conservatives alike;
18 of them have concluded that there will be no job loss.
Businesses do not choose to locate based solely on wages. If
they did, Haiti and Bangladesh would have the largest number of
manufacturing jobs in the world. Businesses do choose to locate
based on the skills and productivity of the work force, the
attitude of the government, the roads and railroads to deliver
products, the availability of a market close enough to make the
transportation costs meaningful, the communications networks
necessary to support the enterprise. That is our strength, and
it will continue to be our strength. As it becomes Mexico's
strength and they generate more jobs, they will have higher
incomes, and they will buy more American products.
We can win this. This is not a time for defeatism. It is a time
to look at an opportunity that is enormous. Moreover, there are
specific provisions in this agreement that remove some of the
current incentives for people to move their jobs just across our
border. For example, today Mexican law requires United States
automakers who want to sell cars to Mexicans to build them in
Mexico. This year we will export only 1,000 cars to Mexico.
Under NAFTA, the Big Three automakers expect to ship 60,000 cars
to Mexico in the first year alone, and that is one reason why
one of the automakers recently announced moving 1,000 jobs from
Mexico back to Michigan.
In a few moments, I will sign side agreements to NAFTA that will
make it harder than it is today for businesses to relocate
solely because of very low wages or lax environmental rules.
These side agreements will make a difference. The environmental
agreement will, for the first time ever, apply trade sanctions
against any of the countries that fails to enforce its own
environmental laws. I might say to those who say that's a giving
up of our sovereignty: For people who have been asking us to ask
that of Mexico, how do we have the right to ask that of Mexico
if we don't demand it of ourselves? It's nothing but fair.
This is the first time that there have ever been trade sanctions
in the environmental law area. This ground-breaking agreement is
one of the reasons why major environmental groups, ranging from
the Audubon Society to the Natural Resources Defense Council,
are supporting NAFTA.
The second agreement ensures that Mexico enforces its laws in
areas that include worker health and safety, child labor, and
the minimum wage. And I might say, this is the first time in the
history of world trade agreements when any nation has ever been
willing to tie its minimum wage to the growth in its own
economy. What does that mean? It means that there will be an
even more rapid closing of the gap between our two wage rates.
And as the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico to
working people, what will happen? They'll have more disposable
income to buy more American products, and there will be less
illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to
support their children by staying home. This is a very important
thing.
The third agreement answers one of the primary attacks on NAFTA
that I heard for a year, which is, "Well, you can say all this,
but something might happen that you can't foresee." Well, that's
a good thing, otherwise we never would have had yesterday. I
mean, I plead guilty to that. Something might happen that Carla
Hills didn't foresee, or George Bush didn't foresee, or Mickey
Kantor or Bill Clinton didn't foresee. That's true. Now, the
third agreement protects our industries against unforeseen
surges in exports from either one of our trading partners. And
the flip side is also true. Economic change, as I said before,
has often been cruel to the middle class, but we have to make
change their friend. NAFTA will help to do that.
This imposes also a new obligation on our Government, and I'm
glad to see so many Members of Congress from both parties here
today. We do have some obligations here. We have to make sure
that our workers are the best prepared, the best trained in the
world.
Without regard to NAFTA, we know now that the average
18-year-old American will change jobs eight times in a lifetime.
The Secretary of Labor has told us, without regard to NAFTA,
that over the last 10 years, for the first time, when people
lose their jobs most of them do not go back to their old job;
they go back to a different job. So that we no longer need an
unemployment system, we need a reemployment system. And we have
to create that. And that's our job. We have to tell American
workers who will be dislocated because of this agreement, or
because of things that will happen regardless of this agreement,
that we are going to have a reemployment program for training in
America. And we intend to do that.
Together, the efforts of two administrations now have created a
trade agreement that moves beyond the traditional notions of
free trade, seeking to ensure trade that pulls everybody up
instead of dragging some down while others go up. We have put
the environment at the center of this in future agreements. We
have sought to avoid a debilitating contest for business where
countries seek to lure them only by slashing wages or despoiling
the environment.
This agreement will create jobs, thanks to trade with our
neighbors. That's reason enough to support it. But I must close
with a couple of other points. NAFTA is essential to our
long-term ability to compete with Asia and Europe. Across the
globe our competitors are consolidating, creating huge trading
blocs. This pact will create a free trade zone stretching from
the Arctic to the tropics, the largest in the world, a $6.5
billion market with 370 million people. It will help our
businesses to be both more efficient and to better compete with
our rivals in other parts of the world.
This is also essential to our leadership in this hemisphere and
the world. Having won the cold war, we face the more subtle
challenge of consolidating the victory of democracy and
opportunity and freedom. For decades, we have preached and
preached and preached greater democracy, greater respect for
human rights, and more open markets to Latin America. NAFTA
finally offers them the opportunity to reap the benefits of
this. Secretary Shalala represented me recently at the
installation of the President of Paraguay. And she talked to
Presidents from Colombia, from Chile, from Venezuela, from
Uruguay, from Argentina, from Brazil. They all wanted to know,
"Tell me, is NAFTA going to pass so we can become part of this
great new market-more, hundreds of millions more of American
consumers for our products."
It's no secret that there is division within both the Democratic
and Republican Parties on this issue. That often happens in a
time of great change. I just want to say something about this
because it's very important. Are you guys resting? I'm going to
sit down when you talk, so I'm glad you got to do it. I am very
grateful to the Presidents for coming here, because there is
division in the Democratic Party and there is division in the
Republican Party. That's because this fight is not a traditional
fight between Democrats and Republicans and liberals and
conservatives. It is right at the center of the effort that
we're making in America to define what the future is going to be
about.
And so there are differences. But if you strip away the
differences, it is clear that most of the people that oppose
this pact are rooted in the fears and insecurities that are
legitimately gripping the great American middle class. It is no
use to deny that these fears and insecurities exist. It is no
use denying that many of our people have lost in the battle for
change. But it is a great mistake to think that NAFTA will make
it worse. Every single solitary thing you hear people talk
about, that they're worried about, can happen whether this trade
agreement passes or not, and most of them will be made worse if
it fails. And I can tell you it will be better if it passes.
So I say this to you: 'Are we going to compete and win, or are
we going to withdraw? Are we going to face the future with
confidence that we can create tomorrow's jobs or are we going to
try against all the evidence of the last 20 years to hold on to
yesterday's? Are we going to take the plain evidence of the good
faith of Mexico in opening their own markets and buying more of
our products and creating more of our jobs, or are we going to
give in to the fears of the worst-case scenario? Are we going to
pretend that we don't have the first trade agreement in history
dealing seriously with labor standards, environmental standards,
and cleverly and clearly taking account of unforeseen
consequences, or are we going to say this is the best you can do
and then some?
In an imperfect world, we have something which will enable us to
go forward together and to create a future that is worthy of our
children and grandchildren, worthy of the legacy of America, and
consistent with what we did at the end of World War II. We have
to do that again. We have to create a new world economy. And if
we don't do it, we cannot then point the finger at Europe and
Japan or anybody else and say, "Why don't" you pass the GATT
agreement; why don't you help to create a world economy?" If we
walk away from this, we have no right to say to other countries
in the world, "You're not fulfilling your world leadership;
you're not being fair with us." This is our opportunity to
provide an impetus to freedom and democracy in Latin America and
create new jobs for America as well. It's a good deal, and we
ought to take it.
Thank you. |
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