Thread: Give Trump his due on trade victory with Mexico, Canada

Give Trump his due on trade victory with Mexico, Canada

October 3, 2018 3:50 pm

President Trump Announces 25% Tariff on Chinese Goods The U.S. trade war with China heats up with the announcement on Friday, which has already sent the Dow down 200 points. The White House said the tariffs will be applied to roughly 1,100 exports. Affected industries include aerospace, auto, robotics and manufacturing. Trump said the tariffs will go into effect on July 6. The announcement comes months after the U.S. first imposed the tariffs on China for stealing American intellectual property and technology secrets.

In baseball, when a team trades a player to another team each side expects a benefit in return. Not so in recent years when it comes to trade agreements between the U.S. and other countries.

President Trump has been right in his criticism of NAFTA and other trade deals that have left the United States at a disadvantage, sidelining American goods, stifling job growth and allowing other countries to steal America's intellectual property.

That has begun to change with a revamped NAFTA deal the Trump administration named the USMCA, which stands for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

At first, Mexico refused to alter its trade policies, but now it has. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced strong opposition to making compromises or changing what Trump said was a tariff as high as “270 percent on U.S. dairy products.” However, hours before a midnight deadline, CNN reported, “the U.S. and Canadian governments agreed to a deal that would allow U.S. farmers greater access to Canada's dairy market and address concerns about potential U.S. auto tariffs.”

In May, even China, which has been the most resistant of all in changing its unbalanced trade policy, announced it was cutting tariffs on imported cars and car parts. More recently it pledged to soon reduce tariffs on a wide-range of consumer goods, including apparel, washing machines and makeup.

As Bloomberg News reported, China's announcement came after the president “decided to move ahead with additional tariffs on $50 billion of imports from China, a move that could potentially derail the truce reached last week between the world's two biggest economies. China hit back at that, with a foreign ministry spokeswoman saying on Wednesday that China would respond accordingly if the U.S. insisted on unilateral measures.”

This is all part of the president's negotiating strategy. It is unlikely China would have made its unilateral move on tariffs had the president not campaigned about an unfair trade imbalance. At what turned into a news conference last Monday, the president said he will deal with China later. His economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox Business Channel “(USMCA) sends an important message to China . North America is together. Nothing is imminent on China. I think there's discussions going on.”

Critics of President Trump have once again been proved wrong. President Obama and other Democrats said manufacturing jobs were never coming back to America. They are. This is what the president said on Monday: “This is also a historic win for American manufacturers and American autoworkers, who have been treated so badly. We have lost so many jobs over the years under NAFTA.”

We are requiring a large portion of every car to be made by high-wage workers, which will greatly reduce foreign outsourcing, which was a tremendous problem, and means more auto parts and automobiles will be manufactured inside the United States.“

He added: ”Our companies won't be leaving the United States, firing their workers and building their cars elsewhere. There is no longer that incentive. It will form America back into a manufacturing powerhouse. ... It will allow us to reclaim a supply chain that has been offshored to the world because of unfair trade issues. This landmark agreement will send cash and jobs pouring into the United States and into North America. ... Instead of jobs leaving for overseas, they will be returning back home.“

The stock market loves it. The Dow Jones rose nearly 280 points on Monday.

Democrats, like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, can only say they want to see details. How do they oppose more jobs and higher wages for American workers?

Past presidents of both parties have mostly bowed to globalists and other nations that have put the interests of their countries first. President Trump, starting with his campaign, promised to put American interests first, not to the detriment of other countries - they also are benefitting - but to even out unfair deals that have harmed America and Americans.

The best response to a policy that isn't working, one based on flawed ideology, is to embrace a policy that works. The USMCA has the potential to do great things for the U.S. There doesn't seem to be a credible argument in opposition.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opin...003-story.html

He really did it, and he did it fast, and he did it right. Great job, Mr. President by you and your Team. Fantastic to be free of NAFTA, to have protections, labor standards, environmental standards, and big game changers with China and any other "nonmarket economy" that doesn't want to play by our rules of free, fair and reciprocal trade, plus keeping the steel and aluminum tariffs at the same time .... awesome.

It's so funny how shallow our news media is. There's this absolutely super-exciting new trade deal that will reposition global trade to our advantage, one of the biggest stories of the last 50 years, and no one is talking about it, investigating it, commentarying about it .... they're all talking about the beer drinking by Kavanaugh at Yale 35 years ago and Trump's hilarious monologue about the Ford testimony at the Tennessee Rally. He knows how to do it ..... Lookey here while I'm over there.

Trade agreements have everything to do with illegal immigration, foreign labor, and legal immigration levels and we dont know what is in this secretive deal yet and we have no reason to trust Trump or Kushner.

Instead of blindly praising Trump for doing something on trade, we need access to the fine print on this deal and we need citizen activists from ALIPAC combing throught the agreement with a fine tooth comb before we find out years down the road we got screwed again.

NAFTA out, USMCA in: What's in the Canada, Mexico, US trade deal?

Canada, Mexico and the US agree to new trade deal. What’s in the agreement? And who are the winners and the losers?

by Heather Gies 1 Oct 2018

Toronto - Canada, Mexico, and the United States ushered in NAFTA 2.0 late on Sunday, just before an end-of-weekend deadline set by the US to salvage the 24-year-old trilateral deal.

Renamed the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the deal updates the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, promising to lead "to freer, fairer markets, and to robust economic growth" in the three-country free trade area.

In a joint statement, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland hailed USMCA as a "modernized" agreement that "will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs".

Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo called it "a state-of-the-art instrument that will bring great economic benefits to Mexico, Canada and the US".

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted after a conversation with his US counterpart that USMCA will "enhance competitiveness & prosperity, while creating new jobs". Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto dubbed the deal a "win-win-win" agreement. US President Donald Trump tweeted: "The USMCA is a historic transaction!"

Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, a researcher with the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives described the agreement as "a mashup between the old NAFTA and the new TPP", the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-country multilateral trade deal from which Trump withdrew the United States.

"While issues like dispute settlement, dairy access and auto rules are dominating news coverage, there may be far more consequential details that emerge as analysts pore over the text in the coming days and weeks," Mertins-Kirkwood told Al Jazeera.

Here's a look at the key points of USMCA:

Sunset clause

While NAFTA had an indefinite lifespan, USMCA will expire in 16 years.

Mexico City, Ottawa, and Washington will conduct a joint review six years after the deal enters into force, with an option to extend the deal beyond the 16-year term.

The so-called "sunset clause" setting a shelf life for the deal was a priority for Trump, who initially wanted the deal to be recertified every five years.

Canada makes concessions on dairy

USMCA is set to significantly open up Canada's dairy market through changes to milk pricing. The deal scraps a Canadian category of milk products, called Class 7, that was created to manage domestic dairy surplus with a pricing structure that kept US diafiltered milk products out of the Canadian market.

According to Sylvain Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, the ability of dairy processors in Canada to buy diafiltered milk from the US will come with a cost for Canadian dairy farmers.

"Canadians may get cheaper dairy products down the road, and more variety. But most importantly, our dairy sector will become more competitive and may create jobs," Professor Charlebois told Al Jazeera.

"But one has to feel for dairy farmers. Canada will lose dairy farms, and we still don't have a strategy for the sector," he added.

USMCA is set to significantly open up Canada's dairy market through changes to milk pricing [Christinne Muschi/Reuters]

In a statement, president and CEO of the Washington-based International Dairy Food Association, Michael Dykes, said USMCA will "allow the US dairy industry to seek more export opportunities" by "maintaining dairy market access in Mexico and improving market access into Canada".

On the agricultural front, the original NAFTA deal has faced criticism for flooding Mexico with cheap, subsidised US products, squeezing local small farmers out of the market. Charlebois says USMCA is unlikely to solve these challenges.

"USMCA is really about America increasing its agricultural footprint in both Mexico and Canada," he said. "Mexico and Canada made significant gains in many other sectors and resolved important issues, but both Mexican and Canadian agricultural sectors have not been spared, if this deal is ratified."

Canada, Mexico dodge car tariffs, new minimum wage for car workers

Mexico and Canada's car industries dodged threats from Trump that the sector could face new tariffs like those slapped on aluminium and steel earlier this year.
USMCA allows the two countries to continue exporting vehicles to the US with a cap that had previously been put in place. However, Canada and Mexico could be impacted if Washington opts for global car tariffs in the future.

The new deal is also expected to help ease outsourcing in the car industry by requiring 40 to 45 percent of vehicle parts to be manufactured by workers earning at least $16 an hour, which is well above the average rate for Mexican car workers.

The deal also strengthens made-in-North-America rules by increasing the percentage of car parts that must be manufactured in North America from 62.5 to 75 percent.

Jerry Dias, national president of Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, told local media that Ottawa succeeded in holding its ground when negotiating car provisions in the deal despite concessions on dairy.

The deal strengthens made-in-North-America rules by upping the percentage of car parts that must be manufactured in North America from 62.5 to 75 percent [File: Eduardo Verdugo/AP Photo]

Dias said the deal met the "major objectives" for the car industry, including creating a framework for continued investment in Canada, doing away with the threat of car tariffs, and limiting further outsourcing. He said the deal is not perfect, but an improvement from NAFTA.

Richard Trumka, president of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the United States, said in a statement that more details are needed to be able to "make a final judgement" on USMCA.

"Added protections for working people and some reductions in special privileges for global companies is a good start, but we still don't know whether this new deal will reverse the outsourcing incentives present in the original NAFTA," Trumka said.

Intellectual property

USMCA strengthens intellectual property regimes by establishing 10-year biologics pharmaceuticals patents, 15-year industrial designs patents, 10-year agricultural chemicals patents. The deal also extends copyright by 20 years.

Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen has warned that monopoly privileges for pharmaceutical companies written into trade agreements undermine efforts to make medicines more affordable by limiting access to generic drugs.


Dispute settlement changes

Controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms that allow companies to sue governments for infringing on potential future profits have been scrapped between Canada and the US.

According to the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, Canada has been the most-sued country under NAFTA with 41 cases brought against it by foreign investors as of the beginning of 2018. Mexico has faced 23 investor-state claims, and the United States has faced 21.

CCPA's Mertins-Kirkwood told Al Jazeera the elimination of the investor-state dispute settlement for Canada was the best news for the country in USMCA.
"ISDS fundamentally undermines government sovereignty for corporate gain at the expense of the public interest. It had been used dozens of times under NAFTA to challenge environmental regulations and other public interest measures in Canada," Mertins-Kirkwood explained.

"Canada's business lobby will be unhappy with the elimination of ISDS, but it's a positive change for the Canadian public."

The state-to-state dispute settlement mechanism was preserved in the new deal and seen as another win for Canada.

No mention of climate change, indigenous rights, gender

Despite heralding itself as a "21st-century" agreement, USMCA does not mention climate change.
The environment chapter addresses issues including biodiversity, air quality, and ship pollution, but remains without any mention of global warming or the Paris climate accords.

US delivers remarks on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]

"There are no enforceable labour or environmental standards. No relief for Mexican farmers," Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Al Jazeera, highlighting that nearly five million Mexican farmers were displaced after NAFTA was introduced.

"Incentives for outsourcing, especially for toxic pollution, remain."

The agreement also lacks provisions to safeguard indigenous rights through consultations processes. It also fails to include a gender chapter.

Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, also argued the deal doesn't go far enough to remedy NAFTA's shortcomings.

"Unless there are strong labour and environmental standards that are subject to swift and certain enforcement, US firms will continue to outsource jobs to pay Mexican workers poverty wages, dump toxins and bring their products back here for sale," Wallach said in a statement.

Winners and losers

Although it remains to be seen who will be the overall winners and losers of USMCA, analysts say big corporations stand to gain the most.

"The winners will, as usual, be some big corporations at the stake of others," Sujata Dey, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians, told Al Jazeera.

Dey applauded the scrapping of ISDS for Canada as a victory, but pointed to a "whole series of opaque rules" investors can use to challenge governments as a cause for concern.

She also cautioned that, like the original NAFTA, the deal will likely threaten small farmers, though there could be wins for Mexican workers and car workers with better wages and collective bargaining rights.

"So, there has been a lot of rearranging of the deal," Dey continued, "but it still benefits big business in the three countries."

According to Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Mexico will also lose by continuing NAFTA's status quo.

"Most people don't know how bad a deal NAFTA was for Mexico," he said. "But a quarter-century after NAFTA, Mexican wages are about the same as they were in 1980, some 20 million more people are in poverty, five million were displaced from agriculture because of NAFTA tariff policy, and economic growth in Mexico ranks about 15 of 20 Latin American countries."

What's next?

Mexico City, Ottawa, and Washington are expected to sign the deal before the end of November, before outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves office.

Then the legislatures of each country must ratify USMCA before it can enter into force, and write legislation to implement it.

If ratified, most of the new agreement's provisions are expected to go into effect in 2020.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/nafta-usmca-canada-mexico-trade-deal-181001195545440.html

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

Trade agreements have everything to do with illegal immigration, foreign labor, and legal immigration levels and we dont know what is in this secretive deal yet and we have no reason to trust Trump or Kushner.

Instead of blindly praising Trump for doing something on trade, we need access to the fine print on this deal and we need citizen activists from ALIPAC combing throught the agreement with a fine tooth comb before we find out years down the road we got screwed again.

The whole agreement has been posted at the US Trade Representative Website since a few hours after the announcement on Monday, October 1, 2018.

https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/fr...-states-mexico

This visa program for Canadian professionals was on Trump’s hit list. Not anymore.

By Franco Ordoñez


October 01, 2018 05:22 PM
Updated October 01, 2018 05:47 PM

WASHINGTON Despite vows to slash the program, the Trump administration on Monday agreed to allow tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of Canadian engineers, doctors and nurses who come to work in the United States to keep their visas as part of the new U.S. trade pact with Canada and Mexico, according to senior administration officials.
It’s a bit of a political concession for President Donald Trump, whose administration called for limits on visa renewals of TN (Treaty NAFTA) visas as part of his “Buy American, Hire American” initiative. While the agreement didn’t include such limits, the administration said Canada was unsuccessful in expanding the controversial program.
“On the question of visas, we have retained existing NAFTA language on that, but not gone beyond it,” said a senior administration official.
The agreement reached Sunday with Canada follows a similar deal reached earlier with Mexico officials, who told McClatchy that TN visas would remain apart of the revised agreement.


Trump has long criticized NAFTA as perhaps the worst deal ever made, often threatening to rip it up and upend billions of dollars of cross-border trade. That stance put some congressional Republicans in a tough position heading into the midterms, since they represent districts with significant stakes in commerce with Canada and Mexico.
On Monday, the White House held a Rose Garden ceremony that sought to portray the newly minted United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or USMCA, as a “promise delivered.” Trump described the new agreement as fair to all sides and puts the United States in a position of strength that its never been in before.
“The agreement will govern nearly $1.2 trillion in trade, which makes it the biggest trade deal in United States history,” Trump said.
Less than 25,000 TN visas were issued for Mexicans in 2016, including about 10,000 for family members of the TN visa recipients, according to State Department records. No statistics are kept for Canadians, who have a lower bar to obtain such visas and can seek them when they arrive at the border.
While keeping the visas is a win for the Canadian officials, it’s also a bit of a political loss for them as well as some high tech workers and union leaders sought to modernize the agreement to include more workers.
“If you’re on the list, its survival is very good news for you,” said Eric Miller, a trade consultant who has worked for the Canadian government and continues to advise them on the negotiations. ”If you were not on the list and hoping to get on the list, today is a big disappointment.”
It’s also a setback for groups like NumbersUSA and Federation for American Immigration Reform that have been lobbying the Trump administration to cut the number of visas. Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports limiting the number of TN visas, saw keeping TN visas intact as “missed an opportunity.”
While the pact does not expand the scope of the program, the bad news, she said, is the administration failed to “ditch this unnecessary guest worker program that for too many years has flown under the radar.”
“The government can’t even tell how many people enter on TN visas, much less what kind of jobs they are filling or who is employing them,” Vaughan added. “Guest worker programs do not belong in trade agreements, period, because we give up control of them to an international bureaucracy, not Congress. U.S. jobs should not be a bargaining chip in trade agreements.”
In recent years, the number of TN visa workers in the U.S. has grown as more people have learned of the program. Since 2008, when the length of stay was increased from one year to three, some groups looked to TN visas as an alternative to other high-skilled visa programs.
Canadians using the program include doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, hotel managers, land surveyors, nutritionists and computer systems analysts.


Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department official who now represents TN visa holders from Canada and Mexico, called Monday an important day for North American relations, emphasizing that the economies of the three nations are more integrated than many realize.
“The Canadians and Mexicans are also winners by keeping the TN-visa in existence in its current form, which allows their companies to have much-needed presence in the United States and allows mobility of workers across the continent,” Fresco said.

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/pol...#storylink=cpy

Trump can't tackle illegal immigration in NAFTA deal -- thanks to border security hard-liner

By S.A. Miller - The Washington Times - Sunday, April 15, 2018

Rep. Steve King, a crusader against illegal immigration, has emerged as the unlikely culprit blocking President Trump from a crackdown on Mexico’s border jumpers in the renegotiation of NAFTA.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly tied the issues together, saying he will scrap the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico does more to stop the flow of people headed north across its territory.

But a 2015 law Mr. King helped author, intended to prevent President Obama from boosting immigration as part of trade pacts, is preventing Mr. Trump from using trade deals to reduce the immigration rate.

Mr. Trump’s prime motivation in tackling NAFTA is to correct what he calls a bad trade deal. It was a top campaign promise to stop the exodus of U.S. factories and manufacturing jobs to low-wage Mexico.

As the talks enter the final stages, Mr. Trump has increasingly mixed the immigration and trade issue, despite restrictions on executive authority to make trade deals.

“Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!” he tweeted this month.

Any immigration agreements between the U.S. and Mexico can’t be in the trade deal, including reducing the number of guest worker visas or creating arrangements for immigration enforcement.

Mr. King, Iowa Republican, said he was glad that his provision stopped Mr. Trump from putting immigration provisions in NAFTA, even though he agrees with the president’s tough immigration policies.

“There are other ways to do immigration — not through trade,” Mr. King told The Washington Times. “The president can throw anything into the negotiation that he chooses, but when they write a treaty, they can’t be writing ‘immigrate’ into that treaty because my language prohibits it.”

He said he did so to protect Congress’ constitutionally enumerated power to write immigration law.

Mr. King warned the Trump administration when the NAFTA renegotiation talks opened last year that immigration couldn’t be part of the deal.

In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the congressman cited the language he tacked onto the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, also known as the customs bill, that says trade agreements “do not require changes to the immigration laws of the United States or obligate the United States to grant access or expand access to visas.”

Mr. King stressed in the letter that he was raising the issue out of concern that the Trump administration would seek to grant more visas, specifically the “TN visas” for temporary professional workers that citizens of Canada and Mexico can get under NAFTA.

He would prefer to have the TN visas stripped from NAFTA in the rewrite.

The restriction, included in a package of legislation granting the president fast-track trade authority, was originally aimed at Mr. Obama as he prepared to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The deal, known as TPP, was a 12-nation agreement among the U.S. and Pacific Rim countries that proponents said would act as a counter to China.

U.S. trade negotiators have often used guest worker visas and other immigration concessions as bargaining chips in cutting trade deals.

A 2008 bilateral trade agreement between Vietnam and the United States shielded from deportation citizens of that communist country who came to the U.S. before 1995. The Trump administration is trying to cancel that arrangement to deport thousands of Vietnamese who are legal U.S. residents but not citizens and have criminal convictions, according to Reuters.

In 2015, there were fears that Mr. Obama would allow TPP to open a floodgate for high-tech workers and other professionals to come to the U.S. Mr. King’s legislation prevented it.

As it turned out, one of Mr. Trump’s first actions as president was to rip up TPP, which he said was another bad trade deal that would ship American jobs overseas.

Michael Camunez, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who helped implement the original NAFTA, said the immigration issue — even if not part of the deal — could blow up the negotiations.

“The president is antagonizing the negotiations with his tweeting and his bombastic rhetoric,” he said. “He is trying to threaten and bully the Mexicans in a way that I don’t think they are going to accept.”

Mr. Camunez added, “The outcome depends on one man and one man only, and that is Donald Trump.”

Any agreement for Mexico to step up immigration enforcement on its side of the border would have to be outside of NAFTA, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

“It would have to be a side agreement or an understanding. I can’t see that it is actually going to be part of NAFTA,” she said. “The TN visas could be up for renegotiation because that is a provision of NAFTA. But these other issues such as enforcement measures and how to deal with asylum seekers and things like that — those are not trade issues.”

The pressure Mr. Trump has exerted on the government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has already paid off.

Mr. Pena Nieto’s government recently intervened against a caravan of about 1,000 migrants headed for the U.S. border, providing transit and humanitarian visas that helped reduce the size of the caravan.

Mexican officials insisted they were not bowing to pressure from Mr. Trump.

“There is no way the Mexican government can escape the perception that they took action on the caravan because of being prodded by Trump,” said Ms. Vaughan. “They never would have stepped in to head off the caravan without Trump drawing attention to it. It just wouldn’t have happened.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...nking-nafta-i/

Nearly one third of Mexican Ph.Ds now work in U.S.

The nonimmigrant NAFTA Professional (TN) visa allows citizens of Canada and Mexico, as NAFTA professionals, to work in the United States in prearranged business activities for U.S. or foreign employers.

Visas for Canadian and Mexican NAFTA Professional Workers

https://travel.state.gov/.../us-visas/employment/visas-canadian-mexican-nafta-professiona...

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Nearly one third of Mexican Ph.Ds now work in U.S.

From the article,

Highly skilled Mexicans also travel north and are met with open arms. By one estimate, 11,000 Mexicans with doctoral degrees reside and work in the United States.

Another estimate says 27 percent of all Mexicans who hold such degrees work north of the border.

Based on the article, Mexico only has about 30,000 people with Ph.D's and 11,000 of those are apparently in the US. The numbers are pretty small. They should go home though and use their educations to help Mexican industries and enterprises.