[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

[[Page 2140]]

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.