    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [December 8, 1993]
    [Pages 2139-2142]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement
    Implementation Act
    December 8, 1993

        Thank you very much. I'm delighted to see all of you here. I thank
    Speaker Foley and the Republican leader, Bob Michel, for joining us
    today. There are so many people to thank, and the Vice President did a
    marvelous job. I do want to mention, if I might, just three others:
    Laura Tyson, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; Bob Rubin,
    head of my national economic team; and one Republican Member of the
    House that wasn't mentioned, Congressman David Dreier, who went with me
    on a rainy day to Louisiana to campaign for NAFTA. There are many others
    that I might mention, but I thank all of you for what you have done.
        I also can't help but note that in spite of all the rest of our
    efforts, there was that magic moment on Larry King, which made a lot of
    difference. And I thank the Vice President for that and for so much
    else. In the campaign, when we decided to come out for NAFTA, he was a
    strong supporter of that position in our personal meetings, long before
    we knew whether we would even be here or not.
        I also would be remiss if I did not personally thank both Mickey
    Kantor and Mack McLarty for the work they did, especially in the closing
    days with the Mexican trade representatives and the Mexican Government.
    I'd also like to welcome here the representatives from Mexico and Canada
    and tell them they are, in fact, welcome here. They are our partners in
    the future that we are trying to make together.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to the Cabinet because we
    have tried to do something that I have not always seen in the past. And
    we try to get all of our Departments and all of our Cabinet leaders to
    work together on

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    all the things that we all care about. And a lot of them, therefore, had
    to take a lot of personal time and business time away from their very
    busy schedules to do this. I thank the former leaders of our Government
    that were mentioned and our military. I can't help but noting, since
    General Powell is here, that every senior military officer with whom I
    spoke about NAFTA was perhaps--they were as a group perhaps the most
    intensely supportive of any group I spoke with. And I think it is
    because they have in their bones the experience of the world of the last
    several decades. And they knew we could not afford to turn away from our
    leadership responsibilities and our constructive involvement in the
    world. And many of them, of course, still in uniform, were not permitted
    to say that in public and should not have been. But I think I can say
    that today I was profoundly personally moved by the remarks that they
    made.
        I do want to say, also, a special word of thanks to all the citizens
    who helped us, the business leaders, the labor folks, the environmental
    people who came out and worked through this--many of them at great
    criticism, particularly in the environmental movement--and some of the
    working people who helped it. And a group that was quite pivotal to our
    success that I want to acknowledge specifically are the small business
    people, many of whom got themselves organized and came forward and tried
    to help us. They made a real difference.
        And they've been mentioned, but I couldn't let this moment go by
    without thanking my good friend Bill Daley and Congressman Bill Frenzel
    for their work in helping to mobilize this effort. Congressman Frenzel
    wrote me a great letter the other day and sent me one of his famous
    doodles that he doodled around the NAFTA legislation, which I am now
    having framed. But they sort of represented the bipartisan spirit that
    encaptured the Congress, encaptured the country in the cause to change.
    I hope that we can have more than that in the days and months and years
    ahead. It was a very fine thing.
        This whole issue turned out to be a defining moment for our Nation.
    I spoke with one of the folks who was in the reception just a few
    moments ago who told me that he was in China watching the vote on
    international television when it was taken. And he said you would have
    had to be there to understand how important this was to the rest of the
    world, not because of the terms of NAFTA, which basically is a trade
    agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, but because it
    became a symbolic struggle for the spirit of our country and for how we
    would approach this very difficult and rapidly changing world dealing
    with our own considerable challenges here at home.
        I believe we have made a decision now that will permit us to create
    an economic order in the world that will promote more growth, more
    equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater
    possibility of world peace. We are on the verge of a global economic
    expansion that is sparked by the fact that the United States at this
    critical moment decided that we would compete, not retreat.
        In a few moments, I will sign the North American free trade act into
    law. NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations. It
    will create the world's largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in
    this country by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements
    negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for
    social progress as well as economic growth. Already the confidence we've
    displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making
    real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it
    could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by
    comparison.
        Today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us. We
    have the opportunity to remake the world. For this new era, our national
    security we now know will be determined as much by our ability to pull
    down foreign trade barriers as by our ability to breach distant
    ramparts. Once again, we are leading. And in so doing, we are
    rediscovering a fundamental truth about ourselves: When we lead, we
    build security, we build prosperity for our own people.
        We've learned this lesson the hard way. Twice before in this
    century, we have been forced to define our role in the world. After
    World War I we turned inward, building walls of protectionism around our
    Nation. The result was a Great Depression and ultimately another
    horrible World War. After the Second World War, we took a different
    course: We reached outward. Gifted leaders of both political parties
    built a new order based on collective security and expanded trade. They
    created a foundation of stability and created in the process the
    conditions

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    which led to the explosion of the great American middle class, one of
    the true economic miracles in the whole history of civilization. Their
    statecraft stands to this day: the IMF and the World Bank, GATT, and
    NATO.
        In this very auditorium in 1949, President Harry Truman signed one
    of the charter documents of this golden era of American leadership, the
    North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO. ``In this pact we hope to
    create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression,'' Truman
    told his audience, ``a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the
    real business of Government and society, the business of achieving a
    fuller and happier life for our citizens.''
        Now, the institutions built by Truman and Acheson, by Marshall and
    Vandenberg, have accomplished their task. The cold war is over. The grim
    certitude of the contest with communism has been replaced by the
    exuberant uncertainty of international economic competition. And the
    great question of this day is how to ensure security for our people at a
    time when change is the only constant.
        Make no mistake, the global economy with all of its promise and
    perils is now the central fact of life for hard-working Americans. It
    has enriched the lives of millions of Americans. But for too many those
    same winds of change have worn away at the basis of their security. For
    two decades, most people have worked harder for less. Seemingly secure
    jobs have been lost. And while America once again is the most productive
    nation on Earth, this productivity itself holds the seeds of further
    insecurity. After all, productivity means the same people can produce
    more or, very often, that fewer people can produce more. This is the
    world we face.
        We cannot stop global change. We cannot repeal the international
    economic competition that is everywhere. We can only harness the energy
    to our benefit. Now we must recognize that the only way for a wealthy
    nation to grow richer is to export, to simply find new customers for the
    products and services it makes. That, my fellow Americans, is the
    decision the Congress made when they voted to ratify NAFTA.
        I am gratified with the work that Congress has done this year,
    bringing the deficit down and keeping interest rates down, getting
    housing starts and new jobs going upward. But we know that over the long
    run, our ability to have our internal economic policies work for the
    benefit of our people requires us to have external economic policies
    that permit productivity to find expression not simply in higher incomes
    for our businesses but in more jobs and higher incomes for our people.
    That means more customers. There is no other way, not for the United
    States or for Europe or for Japan or for any other wealthy nation in the
    world.
        That is why I am gratified that we had such a good meeting after the
    NAFTA vote in the House with the Asian-Pacific leaders in Washington. I
    am gratified that, as Vice President Gore and Chief of Staff Mack
    McLarty announced 2 weeks ago when they met with President Salinas, next
    year the nations of this hemisphere will gather in an economic summit
    that will plan how to extend the benefits of trade to the emerging
    market democracies of all the Americas.
        And now I am pleased that we have the opportunity to secure the
    biggest breakthrough of all. Negotiators from 112 nations are seeking to
    conclude negotiations on a new round of the General Agreement on Tariffs
    and Trade; a historic worldwide trade pact, one that would spur a global
    economic boon, is now within our grasp. Let me be clear. We cannot, nor
    should we, settle for a bad GATT agreement. But we will not flag in our
    efforts to secure a good one in these closing days. We are prepared to
    make our contributions to the success of this negotiation, but we insist
    that other nations do their part as well. We must not squander this
    opportunity. I call on all the nations of the world to seize this moment
    and close the deal on a strong GATT agreement within the next week.
        I say to everyone, even to our negotiators: Don't rest. Don't sleep.
    Close the deal. I told Mickey Kantor the other day that we rewarded his
    laborious effort on NAFTA with a vacation at the GATT talks. [Laughter]
        My fellow Americans, bit by bit all these things are creating the
    conditions of a sustained global expansion. As significant as they are,
    our goals must be more ambitious. The United States must seek nothing
    less than a new trading system that benefits all nations through robust
    commerce but that protects our middle class and gives other nations a
    chance to grow one, that lifts workers and the environment up without
    dragging people down, that seeks to ensure that our policies reflect our
    values.
        Our agenda must, therefore, be far reaching. We are determining that
    dynamic trade cannot lead to environmental despoliation. We will seek

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    new institutional arrangements to ensure that trade leaves the world
    cleaner than before. We will press for workers in all countries to
    secure rights that we now take for granted, to organize and earn a
    decent living. We will insist that expanded trade be fair to our
    businesses and to our regions. No country should use cartels, subsidies,
    or rules of entry to keep our products off its shelves. And we must see
    to it that our citizens have the personal security to confidently
    participate in this new era. Every worker must receive the education and
    training he or she needs to reap the rewards of international
    competition rather than to bear its burdens.
        Next year, our administration will propose comprehensive legislation
    to transform our unemployment system into a reemployment and job
    retraining system for the 21st century. And above all, I say to you we
    must seek to reconstruct the broad-based political coalition for
    expanded trade. For decades, working men and women and their
    representatives supported policies that brought us prosperity and
    security. That was because we recognized that expanded trade benefited
    all of us but that we have an obligation to protect those workers who do
    bear the brunt of competition by giving them a chance to be retrained
    and to go on to a new and different and, ultimately, more secure and
    more rewarding way of work. In recent years, this social contract has
    been sundered. It cannot continue.
        When I affix my signature to the NAFTA legislation a few moments
    from now, I do so with this pledge: To the men and women of our country
    who were afraid of these changes and found in their opposition to NAFTA
    an expression of that fear--what I thought was a wrong expression and
    what I know was a wrong expression but nonetheless represented
    legitimate fears--the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too.
        I ask those who opposed NAFTA to work with us to guarantee that the
    labor and side agreements are enforced, and I call on all of us who
    believe in NAFTA to join with me to urge the Congress to create the
    world's best worker training and retraining system. We owe it to the
    business community as well as to the working men and women of this
    country. It means greater productivity, lower unemployment, greater
    worker efficiency, and higher wages and greater security for our people.
    We have to do that.
        We seek a new and more open global trading system not for its own
    sake but for our own sake. Good jobs, rewarding careers, broadened
    horizons for the middle class Americans can only be secured by expanding
    exports and global growth. For too long our step has been unsteady as
    the ground has shifted beneath our feet. Today, as I sign the North
    American Free Trade Agreement into law and call for further progress on
    GATT, I believe we have found our footing. And I ask all of you to be
    steady, to recognize that there is no turning back from the world of
    today and tomorrow. We must face the challenges, embrace them with
    confidence, deal with the problems honestly and openly, and make this
    world work for all of us. America is where it should be, in the lead,
    setting the pace, showing the confidence that all of us need to face
    tomorrow. We are ready to compete, and we can win.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:37 a.m. in the Mellon Auditorium. H.R.
    3450, approved December 8, was assigned Public Law No. 103-182.