But the autoworkers’ animosity is aiming at the wrong target. There are still more than 800,000 jobs in the American auto sector. And there is a good case to be made that without Nafta, there might not be much left of Detroit at all.
.. “Without the ability to move lower-wage jobs to Mexico we would have lost the whole industry,” said Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, who has been studying the impact of Nafta on industries and workers since its inception more than two decades ago.
.. The industry lost 350,000 jobs, or about a third of its workers, over the period.
..The surge of Mexican exports in the 1990s was propelled by a sharp devaluation of the peso, which set off the so-called Tequila Crisis. The wave of immigration from Mexico into the United States, which lasted until 2005, was driven by a decline in government subsidies to farmers and an economic collapse that occurred just as millions of young Mexicans were entering their late teens and were desperate for jobs.
.. The truth is that autoworkers in Detroit were not just competing with cheap workers in Mexico. They were also competing with American workers in the union-averse South, where many car companies set up shop. They were competing with robots and more efficient Japanese and Korean automakers.
.. The Honda CR-V assembled in El Salto, Jalisco, for example, uses an American-made motor and transmission. Roughly 70 percent of its content is either American or Canadian, according to government statistics.
.. And if the real concern is China — another target of Mr. Trump’s ire — a truly integrated North American market would help keep it at bay.
..“It’s exactly the wrong time to blow up Nafta,” Professor Hanson argued. “We would be doing China an enormous favor.”
Carrier workers see costs, not benefits of global trade
“When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. “When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. “When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.
Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent.
.. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.
.. Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent.
.. Temporary workers, who have contracts lasting from three to six months, earn 163 pesos a day, or $9.40. Permanent workers make 330 pesos for a day’s work, or $19.
Jorge Ramos: The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down
Ramos worried that Trump would recognize him and not call on him. “It will be important to stand up,” he said. “Trump’s street-smart. If you’re sitting, he’ll use it, the visual power imbalance, and squash you.”
.. For those with little patience for the numbing rituals of the modern press conference, Ramos’s insistence on making unwelcome points had been refreshing, and it was Trump’s heavy-handed response that was worrisome. Certainly, the questions raised by Ramos had been unusually serious and substantial at a press event otherwise dominated by talk of poll numbers, campaign operatives, and personal spats.
.. KMEX was also Ramos’s introduction to the community role that the Spanish-language media fills, and is expected to fill, in the United States. The station sponsored health fairs and job fairs, and broadcast English lessons. People called the station to ask which school to send their children to, which doctor to go to. “That TV is your window into the new world you’re in, where you don’t have many friends,” a Cuban-American media consultant in Coral Gables told me. “Those stations are more than information sources. They’re certainly more than businesses. The on-air personalities become like old friends. If you get ripped off, you don’t call the cops, you call Univision or Telemundo. They have these watchdog shows—here in Miami, it’s ‘El 23 a Tu Lado’ [‘23 on Your Side’]. That’s activist journalism.”
.. Zabludovsky, a reedy government mouthpiece with rectangular eyeglasses, was one of the most famous men in Mexico, although he is now remembered for having opened a newscast in October, 1968, after the police and the military had massacred scores of protesting students in the plaza at Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, by intoning, “Today was a sunny day.”
.. Mexico recognized Fidel Castro’s regime—indeed, the two countries enjoyed warm relations—which made the Mexican government anathema to many of South Florida’s Cuban exiles.
.. Cubans ran the place. They understood how the system worked. They had the Cold War policy that said that any Cuban who made it to the U.S. was automatically legal. There were no undocumented Cubans.
.. But then the city began to change, to diversify, first with Central American immigrants fleeing the civil wars there. Next came the Colombians, getting away from the cocaine wars. Then came the Venezuelans, running from Hugo Chávez.”
.. Ramos used to routinely ask, “Is Fidel a dictator?” She laughed. “People would say, ‘Why are you always asking the same question?’ It was because he wanted these heads of state on the record.” His other standard question with Presidents, she said, is “How much money do you have?” “He likes to ask it when they first come into office, and then a second time, a few years later, if they agree to talk again, to see how much they’ve been stealing.”
.. Ramos’s questions often infuriate his interviewees. In Bogotá, in 1996, he demanded that the Colombian President, Ernesto Samper, explicitly state whether or not his election campaign had accepted drug money, and showed Samper a photograph in which he appeared with two alleged narco-traffickers.
.. In a 1994 interview with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the deeply feared Mexican President, Ramos asked Salinas if he had gained office by fraud, as many Mexicans believed. Ramos pressed him on regional vote totals that were mathematically impossible. He questioned Salinas closely about the murder, a few months earlier, of his anointed successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio. (Salinas moved to Ireland after his term ended, amid persistent reports that he did so to avoid murder charges in the Colosio case.) “It was unbelievable that I could sit there and confront him with the evidence of fraud,”
.. Ramos can’t get over the fact that the most trusted voices in mainstream TV news, as far as he’s concerned, are comedians: Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert. Ramos and Oliver have joked together on-air about being immigrants, defeated by telephone voice-recognition systems that force them to adopt American accents to make themselves understood.
.. Ramos’s daughter, Paola, who recently earned a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has a job on the Hillary Clinton campaign. She previously worked in the Obama White House, and for Jill Biden. Ramos insists that his daughter’s employment does not influence his work. His Republican critics don’t buy it. He did not disclose her work for the Obama Administration to his audience.
Candidates Reagan & Bush-41 Discuss Illegal Immigration in 1980 Debate
The candidates are asked a question about the children of Illegal Immigrants attending public schools in 1980(!).