FREE TRADE AND CHEAP LABOR: THE PRESIDENT’S DILEMMA

• Lindsey Grant
• October 1, 1991
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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FREE TRADE AND CHEAP LABOR: THE PRESIDENT’S DILEMMA
An NPG Forum Paper
by Lindsey Grant
October 1991

Foresight is the art of recognizing how changes in one sector may affect policies in another.’ Lacking a systematic foresight process, our government is apt to be astonished by results it did not anticipate. The President’s pursuit of hemispheric free trade is a dramatic and potentially tragic case in point. The demographics of Central and South America threaten to make a disaster of a policy that was envisaged as simply an economic and trade issue. This paper is an effort, by a writer on foresight and erstwhile Deputy Assistant Secretary of Stale for En Yfronment and Population Affairs, to make those missing connections.

The President has embarked upon a project to create a hemispheric free trade area, with Canada already aboard and negotiations with Mexico next on the agenda. Congress has tentatively acquiesced. It has given the President authority to negotiate an agreement with Mexico, reserving only the right to say yes or no to the entire package.

Organized labor has tried unsuccessfully to focus attention on the implications for American wages and employment, but nobody has really looked at the numbers, and the environmental movement has yet to address the demographic implications and what they mean for our future.

Congress and the President would do well to scrutinize the proposal more closely. There are theoretical and even real arguments for free trade, but there are land mines in the present project.

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