Border truckers closely watching what Trump does with NAFTA
LAREDO, Texas: Just north of one of the busiest commercial border crossings with Mexico is Interstate 35’s Exit 12B, where US truckers often stop before hauling trailers filled with Mexican groceries, car parts, construction materials and other goods out into the country.
There’s a constant buzz of business here - home to three truck stops, a tyre shop, numerous warehouses, a strip club and several taco trucks - made possible by the 23-yearold North American Free Trade Agreement, which has quickened the flow of goods between Mexico, the United States and Canada.
President Donald Trump has called NAFTA “a complete and total disaster,” and he was preparing to announce this past weekend his intention to terminate the agreement, only to be talked down by some of his advisers and the leaders of Mexico and Canada. But Trump still wants to negotiate dramatic changes.
The president’s anti-NAFTA rants have long been a rallying point for his voters in industrial ghost towns who blame the agreement for making it easier for factories to move overseas. But, as Trump’s advisers pointed out last week, terminating NAFTA could deeply harm many rural communities and farms in states that voted for the president - and it would jolt the long- distance trucking industry that provides good-paying jobs for those willing to drive hundreds of miles away from home.
Trump has long counted on truckers for support. “No one knows America like truckers know America,” Trump said in March, wearing a button that said “I ( heart) trucks” as trucking industry representatives visited the White House. Later, the president posed for photos in a big rig parked outside.
Truckers recently passing through Exit 12B sharply varied in their views of Trump’s promise to upend NAFTA, with some worrying it would threaten their livelihood and others optimistically hoping it would lead to a revival of manufacturing in America that would create more jobs in their far-flung home towns.
Many of these truckers - especially those who live in Texas - said they couldn’t imagine Trump actually doing anything that would slow trade with Mexico, and they don’t expect him to follow through with his tough talk.
They said doing so could crash the economy here on the border, killing many of the jobs dependent on trucks passing through while harming the economy elsewhere and driving up prices for consumers.
“He’s really going to mess the economy up?” said Ervin Whipple, 51, a trucker from San Antonio who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton and has lots of concerns about Trump - but dramatically changing NAFTA is not one of them. “If he does that - nah, he ain’t going to do that. He’s just talking.”
Others - many of whom live far from Laredo in towns where good-paying jobs have become scarce - said they would love to see the president make trade with Mexico more difficult in hopes that companies would then be forced to manufacture products in the towns where they live.
Donald Comer, 51, has been trucking for more than 20 years and lives in the small North Carolina town of Crumpler, not far from the borders of Virginia and Tennessee. He grew up in Delaware, where his grandfather and father worked at a Chrysler factory that closed about a decade ago.
In 2009, Comer moved to North Carolina’s Ashe County to be close to his mother, who was sick. There, factories were also shutting down and moving operations overseas where labour is cheaper.
“This used to be one of the biggest furniture-making areas, and now people are living in poverty because there are no jobs here,” Comer said of Ashe County. “My girlfriend’s family, there are two or three people in the family who can’t find a job because there is nothing here. Without having to travel a hundred miles away, there’s nothing right here in our area.”
Comer voted for Trump and wants the president to withdraw from or, at the very least, rewrite NAFTA, believing that would force companies to quickly move production back to the United States.
He realises that could lead to higher prices, but he’s willing to pay more to see his neighbours and relatives employed. And he’s not worried that such a big shift in trade policy would hurt his industry.
“No, no, no, no, because the companies then come back here and end up building products here in America. They still have to have that product hauled from place to place,” Comer said. “That’s not going to hurt the industry. It might help it.”
While Trump promised on the campaign trail to “terminate,” “rip up” or “renegotiate” international trade deals, members of his Cabinet instead suggested the president merely wants to tweak NAFTA. Last month, the administration sent a draft letter to Congress that outlined modest changes it wanted to see made to the agreement.
But Trump’s message hasn’t seemed to change - even if he has vacillated between wanting to immediately abandon the pact and being open to renegotiation.
“You have to understand, we have been on the wrong side of the NAFTA deal with Canada and with Mexico for many, many years, many decades,” Trump said at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night.
“We can’t allow it to happen. So we are going to renegotiate. And if we can’t make a fair deal for companies and our workers, we will terminate NAFTA, okay?”
While Trump backed off his threat to soon scrap the deal, until he details what changes he wants, many companies are hesitant to invest more money in warehouses or new ventures in border towns, said Laredo’s mayor, Pete Saenz, who leads this city of roughly 250,000 where more than 95 per cent of residents are Latino or Hispanic. He said it’s also unclear whether plans to yet again increase the number of lanes on the World Trade Bridge - a commerce- only entry point on the border that Saenz calls “NAFTA on wheels” - will proceed.
“There’s this uncertainty here, and people are holding back, especially investors here in the border area,” said Saenz, a lawyer who was elected in 2014. “The sooner we come up with a policy as to how we’re going to deal with all of these border issues - border security, NAFTA, immigration - the better, so we can all adjust to it and move forward, because it is hurting us economically.”
In July 2015, Trump visited Laredo and the World Trade Bridge for a crash course in the parts of NAFTA that help the country. The visit came on the heels of Trump’s campaign announcement speech, in which he broadly painted undocumented immigrants from Mexico as criminals and rapists. Upon landing in Laredo, Trump declared: “They say there is a great danger for me to be here.”
Trump visited the bridge and watched trucks flowing in and out of the country as his hosts peppered him with statistics about the thousands of trucks hauling products each day, fuelling the economy not just in Laredo but across the region.
“He didn’t have much feedback,” Saenz said. “He was kind of in a taking-it-in mode. But he did listen, so we’ll see. I think it’s going to work out. Frankly, I want him to succeed on these issues because, frankly, it’s important for the country to succeed.”
Saenz says he has been assured by members of the Texas congressional delegation that Trump will not actually follow through with many of his NAFTA threats.
The mayor is also confident the president will not construct a physical wall along the entire border, which could plop an eyesore into a riverside park near Laredo’s new outlet mall. — WP-Bloomberg