[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 116 (Thursday, July 11, 2019)]
[House]
[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.

                          ____________________