Stop CAFTA

- NAFTA/CAFTA style free trade policies don’t just hurt American workers. CAFTA style free trade hurt farms and small businesses in poor countries when U.S. multinationals and agribusiness push them out of markets. When export-oriented economies fail to create as many jobs as they destroy, massive poverty and unemployment force desperate people to migrate.

- Free trade impoverishes already poor countries and forces migration. As former Sierra Club President David Brower put it: “Rather than complaining about immigration from Mexico, the U.S. could stop causing it.”

- NAFTA’s agricultural conditions forced Mexican farmers to compete with a glut of subsidized U.S. corn, driving an estimated minimum of 1.5 million Mexican farmers out of business. Mexican manufacturing workers also experienced a 20% decline in real wages during NAFTA’s first five years. Finally, workers in the maquiladora sweatshops opened along the U.S.-Mexico border often earn only one-quarter to one-half of what they need to provide basic necessities to their families. These workers and farmers often have no choice but to migrate.

- Corporate globalization places severe pressures on U.S. workers, including job insecurity, low wages, a diminished power to collectively bargain and reduced spending on social services like education and healthcare. In times of economic and political duress, immigrants are used as scapegoats for the very economic problems caused by free trade and corporate globalization.

- It is hypocritical for our Senators and Representatives to support free trade agreements like CAFTA while claiming to be for immigration reform. Politicians should start looking at the real causes of migration, low wages and job insecurity. Our Senators and Congressional Representatives should say no to free trade instead of unfairly blaming immigrants.