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CAFTA Will Keep Central American Workers Down
House of Representatives - July 27, 2005

Mr. Speaker, a question you might ask tonight is: Why are we passing this Central American Free Trade Agreement?

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Today, the President of the United States came up to the Republican caucus and someone reported to me that he made some statement equal to, we have had a marvelous year. Now, if you think about what has gone on in the last 6 months, you would have a hard time finding any marvelous year. I must have missed it somewhere.

Our trade deficit is as big as it has ever been in our history. So is this a fix for that? If we pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement, will that fix our problems in trade?

Let me put it in perspective for you. The combined economies of these six countries is $85 million GDP. That is equivalent to Tampa, Florida, and the neighborhood around it. That is what kind of place we are talking about. We are talking about a little bitty place.

Now, what do they have down there? Well, they have lots of poor people. Right? Good workers. Hard workers. A lot of them go to a lot of trouble to try to come up here and get into this country. And people wonder why? Well, it is because they are hard-working people. They are tough, they work hard, and they go through a lot of stress and strain. So if we can keep them down in their own country and keep them working down there where they do not have any laws and move our jobs down there to them, well, who wins in that?

I guess they get a 50-cent-an-hour job. That is a real improvement. With no protections, no guarantees from a union that they are going to have health care or education or worker safety or any of the things that our workers have in this country. But we have got a cheap workforce.

You heard the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) talk about one of the underlying things here. One of the ideas about this bill is if we can keep them down there, they will not be coming in up here. We will stop that immigration. Let me tell you something, folks. It has not stopped it from Mexico. It is not going to stop it from Central America. These people know. They are not stupid. They may be poor, but they can figure it out. And they can figure out working for 50 cents an hour down there is not as good as coming up here and getting involved in even the most menial jobs in this country.

So what we are saying is we have negotiated a treaty. Did we negotiate a trade agreement with the workers? No. If you look at every single one of those countries, they are all the same. They have a very thin elite who control the whole country, and have for centuries. And all we are doing is giving them more power to work on their workers. That, in my view, is not fair to the workers, and it is not an honest way for this country to operate.

We are setting no example for the world by keeping poor workers down.