Jim Gilchrist, MMP Exclusive – Writing in the March 10 issue of The Wall Street Journal Online, Argeo Paul Cellucci and Stephen R. Kelly assert that if workers were allowed to move freely in North America, the ‘path to U.S. citizenship’ problem would fade away:
“Take the final logical step of the North American Free Trade Agreement — and allow the citizens of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to work legally in any of the three countries, making the U.S. border as open to workers as it has been for nearly two decades to goods and investment.”
How’s that been working for us?
According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, we have posted trade deficits with Canada and Mexico every year since NAFTA. We finished 2012 with a $79.7 billion trade deficit with Canada and a $101.2 billion trade deficit with Mexico.
Now the bobble-headed elites want to parlay the same “success” in goods and investment to the free movement of labor. Never mind that NAFTA has already resulted in the loss of over 1 million U.S. jobs because American companies moved their operations to Mexico, and continue to do so.
Of note, IBM just announced that it is moving most its manufacturing operations out of Rochester, Minnesota to Mexico. A few thousand American workers may be hurt.
If the elites can somehow convince our craven politicians in Washington that the free flow of labor around the three-nation NAFTA zone is a good idea, there is only one likely outcome. We will see wages, already stagnant since 2000, plummet to new lows, while big corporations rake in heftier profits based on the looming surge of virtually limitless cheap labor.
Instead of competing with cheap labor worldwide, blue-collar workers will find themselves competing against pools of cheap labor right here at home – in their own neighborhoods. Big Business can be counted on to use this as a billy club on American workers.
We already see a hint of what’s to come in the behavior of Caterpillar, the maker of industrial, construction and mining equipment. While it reported record profits in 2012, it strong-armed a six-year wage freeze from many of its blue-collar workers. Imagine what would have happened to these workers if Caterpillar plants were surrounded by foreigners yearning for those jobs at half the pay, or less.
Not only has Caterpillar gotten away with bulldozing its own workers in this way, it has set a precedent for the way middle class Americans will be treated under any plan that opens the Nation to the free flow of labor from Mexico and Canada. Cellucci and Kelly even state that one of the benefits of free-flow labor is to provide greater flexibility to employers. They do not elaborate on the kind of “flexibility” they expect employers to gain by this arrangement. That would be condescending.
Cellucci and Kelly go on to cite all the splendid benefits the rest of us will enjoy under this plan – you know, the same benefits promised to us during the NAFTA debate in the 1990s. Left to their own devices, our elected in Washington will fall for this drivel yet again. They always do.
