Support for NAFTA Is Unraveling

President Clinton showed leadership and political courage in pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement through a reluctant Congress four years ago. Even as he looked ahead to a tough reelection fight, Clinton ran the risk of alienating such key Democratic constituencies as organized labor and environmental groups to enact the trade pact initiated by his Republican predecessor.

But he wasn’t the only politician who showed vision and guts on NAFTA. While the groundbreaking trade pact had solid support in the Senate, NAFTA might never have gotten to Clinton’s desk if 68 Democrats in the House had not voted in favor of it. And among that cadre of pro-NAFTA Democrats, no one stuck his political neck out further than Esteban Torres of Pico Rivera.

Torres has represented several bustling blue-collar cities of southeast Los Angeles County in Congress for 15 years. But his roots as a traditional pro-labor liberal run far deeper than that. He once worked on an auto assembly line and even was a shop steward for the United Auto Workers.

But Torres also worked as a UAW representative in Latin America, which helped him establish pretty solid credentials as an internationalist. During the Carter presidency, he served for a time as ambassador to UNESCO.

So it was pretty hard, in 1993, to find a Democrat who was more conflicted about NAFTA, or who ran a bigger political risk if he voted for it. Thus, when Torres announced that he would support NAFTA, his decision swayed several other members of Congress’ Hispanic Caucus to join him.

That is why the White House would be well advised to pay attention now that key members of the Hispanic Caucus, once again influenced by Torres, are backing away from NAFTA. This trend could delay or even derail Clinton’s plan to expand NAFTA to include Chile and eventually other Latin American countries. A key vote on that proposal is expected in the fall, when the administration will ask Congress to approve “fast track” authorization to negotiate NAFTA’s extension.

Torres and his supporters do not dispute the conclusion of a recent administration report that found NAFTA’s performance over the last three years mixed but still “modestly positive” for U.S. jobs and exports. But they argue that more needs to be done to mitigate the impact of free trade on U.S. workers.

Torres and other members of Congress asked a leading expert on NAFTA, Raul Hinojosa of UCLA, to revisit some of the studies he conducted in the early 1990s on NAFTA’s possible impact. (These studies were used to help promote NAFTA in 1993.) Hinojosa crunched the numbers he got from Clinton’s Treasury and Labor departments more precisely than the administration’s NAFTA report did and came away with the worrisome conclusion that African Americans, women and Latinos suffered disproportionate job losses because of NAFTA, especially in California and the other states bordering Mexico.

The biggest impact Hinojosa found was in the Texas border city of El Paso, where roughly 6,000 jobs in the apparel industry moved south across the Rio Grande. Hinojosa estimates that this raised El Paso’s unemployment rate from 9% to 12%.

NAFTA’s impact on El Paso is the reason that one of the first Latinos in Congress to join Torres’ effort to mitigate NAFTA’s impact was Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the former Border Patrol chief elected to Congress last year.

Another Latino freshman who has signed up with Torres is Orange County’s Loretta Sanchez, who is concerned about Mitsubishi’s decision to close an electronic components plant in Santa Ana and move 450 jobs to Mexico.

Neither Sanchez nor Reyes was around to take the risk that Torres did in voting for NAFTA in 1993. That these rising Democratic stars in Congress are willing to break with the White House over NAFTA now is another warning sign that Clinton’s free-trade policies may be in trouble.

“I still believe free trade is the future of the U.S. economy, but I may have been wrong in supporting NAFTA,” Torres says. “I won’t make the same mistake twice, and plan to vote against fast track unless I get assurances that a lot more will be done to mitigate NAFTA’s impact on American workers.”

It is a rare politician who will publicly admit a mistake. Maybe even a courageous one. One wonders if Clinton will have the guts it takes to revisit NAFTA and fix what apparently needs fixing.