Today, Explained - It’s hard to ratify U-S-M-C-A

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

President Trump wants his NAFTA replacement deal ratified. But President Trump appears to be standing in the way. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It might feel like summer out there, but technically it's still spring, and the people over at the Quip Electric Toothbrush Company would like you to know that it's never too late to do some spring cleaning on the old mouth there. The Quip Electric Toothbrush starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com slash explained, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained right now, your first set of refills comes for free. This is the CBS Sunday Night News. Remember NAFTA? All the resources of the Clinton administration are focused now on getting the House to vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement. And the sound of arms being twisted is everywhere in Washington tonight. Remember how the president wanted to get rid of it? I have long contended that NAFTA was perhaps the worst trade deal ever made.

Remember how he did get rid of it? USMCA, right? Like YMCA. If you have a problem remembering it, just think of the song YMCA. We love that song. Now, the new NAFTA, the USMCA, is somehow in trouble. And President Trump is somehow right in the middle of it. It's not going great. Jen Kirby's been writing about this particular mess for Vox. signed it back in November, it basically stalled because the Trump administration had kept steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And this was a big sticking point for both of those

countries. It would have been hard to pass a trade deal when one of the countries involved has pretty steep tariffs on both of the other two countries. So back in May, the Trump administration negotiated with both of those countries and essentially got rid of the tariffs. They scrapped them. And this, hopefully, we thought cleared the way to getting it passed in the United States, Canada and Mexico. And I guess that's kind of where the trouble starts. Let's go through the three countries north to south. How's ratification going in Canada? Let us join our hands in song. Aye, not a hymn to war like our national anthem, but a sweet, soothing hymn like the national anthem of Canada. Oh, Canada, our home and native land. Things are going okay in Canada.

Once the steel and aluminum tariffs were removed, the Canadian government decided to move ahead to try to get this passed. They want to get it passed really by the end of this month, June, because their parliament is going out of session and they have an election coming up in October. So all of their members of parliament want to be spending that time running for re-election. And that includes Justin Trudeau. We did everything in our power to protect Canadian workers and their families and ensure the success of our economy.

And it paid off. And vice president Mike Pence went up there last week and met with Trudeau. And as far as we know, they're moving ahead with getting it ratified. OK, jumping down a country, how's ratification going here in the United States? A little bit more complicated. There's kind of the big issue, of course, is that the Democrats control the House. And if we back up a little bit, President Trump in the 2016 campaign made it one of his signature promises that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA, which he called the worst trade deal. Maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now he renegotiated and updated NAFTA.

And he wants to have that, you know, feather in his cap, so to speak, when he goes out on the campaign trail and says, I renegotiated the worst trade deal of all time. And now we have this great new trade deal called the USMCA. Democrats, however... We have to do what is in the interest of America's workers. This would be like saying, you don't like NAFTA? Let me put a little syrup on top and serve it to you again, and you're really going to like it this time. They don't believe there's enough enforcement mechanisms

to really kind of give those new standards teeth. And they're particularly looking at Mexico and wanting to have, you know, just stricter enforcement laws that will make sure to protect workers. And so that's what they're pushing back on with the administration. And their talks have been going fairly well. I believe Pelosi suggested that, you know, it was possible that they could get a yes. It was just a matter of when and how those details would be worked out.

But last week, Trump riled Democrats a bit by sending this notice to them. Its fancy name is a draft statement of administrative action. And what it basically is, is saying in 30 days, I'd really like to submit my USMCA legislation to get it passed. It can be longer than 30 days, but the gist of it is Trump is trying to put pressure on Democrats to get this bill passed by basically the end of the summer so he can have it for the campaign trail and do it before the campaign sort of gets into full swing. And then there's Mexico. How's USMCA ratification going down in the M? Things in Mexico were also going pretty well.

Mexico had passed a bunch of laws to help beef up their labor standards to be in compliance with the USMCA. And we're moving ahead with ratification. Until President Trump threw a big curveball in last week with a surprise announcement. President Trump's dramatic escalation in the battle over the border, announcing new tariffs on Mexico overnight unless Mexico takes action to stop migrants from crossing into the U.S. Trump was going to start imposing tariffs, I believe, starting June 10th, so next week. And this was a big surprise. And it certainly isn't related, at least according to Trump, to the USMCA

and the administration has said they're not linked. But it's hard not to see how this won't be a hiccup in trying to get it passed in Mexico. What does it mean that the president has now tied this trade deal sort of to migration at the southern border? Well, it's definitely complicated things. Mexico wants to pass the USMCA, but they're in an awkward situation now where one of their partners in this trade agreement is now kind of waging a trade war against them.

What's even more complicated is Republicans in the House and Senate who want to support NAFTA are now getting skittish about the USMCA because Trump has reimposed tariffs. So Trump just added a huge complication that wasn't there before. And it's not really for an issue that's related to the USMCA. It's related to the southern border, which is a problem no one has been able to solve. There's still time to figure this out. One week, exactly. What it'll take after the break. Hello? Tim from Brooklyn. Hello. I recently saw you in the borough of Brooklyn.

We watched Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals over an exchange of a particular item. Do you recall the item? Because you didn't order your Quip at getquip.com slash explained where the Quip starts at just $25 and your first set of refills is free. You didn't go to getquip.com slash explained. I managed to finagle you a Quip and I sent it to you via mail. Lucky for you that you sent me a different color than the one that Manny had because we share a bathroom. And so he's got the silver one, I've got the gold one. We need a bronze.

When you made a third roommate, you should get a bronze one. I know just the website for that third roommate. Getquip.com slash explained. Oh my God. We've got to go check it out. Dara Lind, Weeds Podcast. The president has now tied his all-important trade deal with Canada and Mexico to the situation at our southern border. What is the latest there? So there's this massive wave of migration of largely, though not entirely, children and

families from the northern triangle of Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, through Mexico up to the United States. Many of them are presenting themselves for asylum. The U.S. system is not equipped to handle this at all. Our apprehension numbers are off the charts compared to recent years. As of April 30th, we apprehended 460,294 people on the southern border. The Trump administration is furthermore concerned that because a lot of these people are getting released into the United States with court dates, that they're then going to abscond and we're going to have this problem in which people will be coming into the U.S. without papers. And even if they couldn't ultimately qualify for asylum, they'll end up being able to stay here. And we've spoken to you about this, obviously, a half dozen or even more times on the show. Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? It's gotten worse. And it's not clear to what extent this is just a seasonal thing. Like in general, there tend to be more

people coming to the U.S. crossing the border in like April and May than there were in the earlier months of the year. And then that tends to decrease in late summer. It's not a seasonal workflow or anything, so it's not entirely clear whether we can expect this to just kind of be the peak or whether it's going to continue to get worse. Some of the stuff that I've heard has suggested that a lot of what's going on right now are smugglers using Donald Trump's rhetoric to actually say to people, if you want to come, you need to come now because the president's about to crack down. But right now, the system doesn't have the resources to deal with it on the U.S. side. And it's not very easy to kind of build up that capacity in a short period of time. What is Mexico doing as it stands right now to deal with this? So the Mexican government is in a very tricky position because since December, they've been led by a leftist president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who like migration was never his huge issue.

But he appointed some people who were very big on human rights, very big on migrant rights. But at the same time, they are dealing with a lot of pressure from the Trump administration. So they've kind of vacillated back and forth. Initially, they were doing a lot of providing these short-term three-month visas for people to be able to come through Mexico legally and then go into the United States. trying to say they're honoring migrant rights and not stopping people from seeking asylum and trying to do containment of large groups of migrants, especially if you think about the geography of this. The Guatemalan-Mexican border is fairly narrow. It's certainly compared to like the Mexico-U.S. border. It's a little bit narrower. So they just don't necessarily have the capacity to be doing kind of mass detention and deportation

in the way that the U.S. can. Even with that much smaller border. Right. They've poured money into it over the last decade. But the crackdown that they have had has often been kind of at the expense of human rights. So the idea that they're going to be able to kind of crack down in a systematic way rather than just in a like terrible impeding human rights way isn't something they've really developed the muscles for as a state. Okay, so they are doing something to police their border. Yeah.

And they are giving out these visas. Is there anything else Mexico is doing? They are now expanding their offices that they have in which they offer asylum in Mexico. Okay, so they've got some policing of the border, some visas, and some asylum centers. What is the U.S. now asking for? That is not clear. If you listen to Donald Trump, he will say that they are just asking for Mexico to stop more people from coming. He wants substantial reductions in the numbers of people coming into the U.S. from Mexico.

Is he giving Mexico clear standards, benchmarks, goals? No, no. He's just saying that he wants the numbers substantially reduced. There are Trump administration officials who are trying to, like, fill that stuff in with something that's a little more focused on what Mexico can do rather than just the results they want to see. Yeah. The big thing that the Trump administration has wanted from Mexico for a while

is they want to be able to sign a bilateral agreement with Mexico that's called a safe third country agreement. It's like what the U.S. has with Canada. Basically, each country that signs the agreement says we recognize that the other country is a safe place for asylum seekers to be. And so if you come through one of these countries and then seek asylum in the other one, we're going to turn you back. Is this something he's specifically tying these tariffs to? It's not explicit. It's something where if you have listened to enough Trump administration rhetoric, you hear talk of Mexico like doing more in its domestic asylum policies. And they say, because, you know, Mexico is a safe third country for these asylum seekers. Like,

you can read between the lines that that would be a thing that they would want to see. Mexico understands that that is a thing the U.S. wants. And it's the one thing that they explicitly say, and they have explicitly said this from jump, that they do not want to do. It just sounds like there are so many ambiguous things here that the president is kind of asking for, but not really asking for them. But he is tying it all to these tariffs. It is, as usual, important to distinguish the Trump administration's strategy, which is a thing that exists, from Donald Trump's demands, which may or may not be tied to a strategy. As far as Donald Trump is concerned, he is perfectly

happy imposing a 5% tariff on all goods and then raising that every month until the numbers go down. Trump administration officials, and bear in mind that a lot of the people who are working on this in the government did not want this to happen. Trump's economic advisors think this is a terrible idea. So they're kind of trying to backfill here. It's a terrible idea because it'll hurt Mexico as well as the United States. Right. Absolutely. It is generally accepted among people who are not Donald Trump that in order to cover the cost of the tax that they have to pay to export goods into the U.S., like the company will end up raising the price of those goods. So American consumers will end up paying the price. And this is especially important because

a lot of the trade between Mexico and the U.S. is in car parts. The process of from the raw materials to like a final car that is on a dealer's lot often involves like four or five times various components getting shipped back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. So if every one of those components carries a 5% tariff, that's a massive increase in the cost of the car because the car company is going to say, well, we have to make money on this car. We can't lose money, so we're going to charge more for it.

So it's generally assumed that this is just going to suck for both Mexican companies and American consumers. That's even above and beyond the fact that Mexico is allowed to retaliate if they want to assess tariffs on U.S. goods. Like China's doing right now. Or like Mexico did, actually. Trump put steel and aluminum tariffs on Mexico last year. Mexico retaliated by putting tariffs on things like American pork and American bourbon. That just got worked out and those tariffs got erased last month. And now all of a sudden, Trump is doing it all over again. So we got, what, seven days to figure it out? Yes. The Mexican foreign minister is in the U.S. He's the one who has kind of been the point person.

But in the meantime, Donald Trump, he hasn't said anything that indicates that he's more willing to walk back the tariffs or he's even open to negotiating. The official line from the White House is that that's happening a week from now regardless. So apart from what this might mean for United States industry, for Mexican industry, for the relationship between the United States and Mexico, has anyone gotten any closer to figuring out how to deal with the humanitarian crisis at the border? Yeah, I mean, people are thinking about it. The problem is that this is a massive regional phenomenon, right? Like, it is a wartime level of migration. It's literally, it's something you don't see outside the context of civil wars. So it involves the governments of these countries. It involves Mexico.

It involves the U.S. It requires the assistance from organizations like the U.N lot of trying a lot of different approaches and not just hoping that there's going to be one magic pill that's going to solve everything. And politicians don't like that. And Donald Trump really doesn't like that, right? Donald Trump has always acted as if he believes that countries can choose to send people or they can choose to keep people. And so he's never really demonstrated an understanding that you can't just swing shut the gates and have migration stop on demand. And as long as that kind of results now mentality is what's governing American policy, you're not going to get a response to the humanitarian crisis because humanitarian crisis responses happen on a much longer timeline

than what Donald Trump thinks about. Dara Lind covers immigration for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Furrum, and this is Today Explained. Thanks to the Quip electric toothbrush people for supporting the show again today. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25, and you can find it at getquip.com slash explain, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explain, where your first set of refills is free. Over 1 million people have made that jump

and bought the Quip electric toothbrush. You could be 1 million and, well, I've been saying 1 million and 1, but who are we kidding? It's probably like 1,372,494 at this point or something. Anyway, you could join them. Think about it. Avery Truffleman, you've produced amazing podcasts

for 99% Invisible for a long time. Now you're hosting your own show for the Vox Media Podcast Network in collaboration with Curbed. It's called Nice Try. What's it all about? Well, there's nothing nice about it. It's stories about failed utopias. It's about people who have not liked the society around them or the way they're living or the city they live in. And they try to branch off and start something new.

And it just turns into something different than they thought it would. What made you want to make a show about that, Avery? You know, I've heard it said that in moments where things are going well, everyone wants to learn about dystopia. And in moments where everything feels terrible, everyone wants to learn about dystopia. And in moments where everything feels terrible, everyone wants to hear about utopias and learn if utopia is at all possible or if anyone has found a way to escape the world. So you'll definitely come away with some like

pretty solid do's and don'ts about designing your own world. Nice try. There's an exclamation point at the end. Rate, review, subscribe, download, tell a friend, tell someone you don't even like.