October 26, 1999

Mr. President, I want to address the issue of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the African Growth and Opportunity Act which is pending before the Senate. The package of incentives the Senate is considering this week includes the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the United States-Caribbean Basin Trade Enhancement Act, and the reauthorization of the Generalized System of Preferences and Trade Adjustment Assistance. Those are the four pieces of the proposal before us.

The Trade Adjustment Assistance dates back to 1962, when we decided to provide assistance to men and women in this country who had been adversely affected as a result of trade policies and who lost jobs. Trade adjustment allows for those individuals and companies that may be adversely affected to get some help. It has been a good law for almost 40 years, and I am confident this piece of the package is one all of our colleagues will support.

The matter dealing with the Generalized System of Preferences, the GSP, is also pretty routine, and one that we need to have enacted. I am, again, confident that this provision will also enjoy broad-based support.

The two pieces that are provoking the debate have to deal with the enhancement of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act.

I will spend a couple minutes talking about both of those provisions. I support them. I think they are important pieces of legislation that are going to accrue to the benefit of our country. I know there are those who are going to argue that somehow this is going to cause great damage to certain workers in the country. I don't believe it to be the case. In fact, I argue that if we were to defeat the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Africa Growth provisions, that they will actually accrue to the detriment of workers.

These are two important provisions which are going to enhance job opportunities in this country and are not going to harm people. I notice the presence of the distinguished Senator from Delaware, chairman of the Finance Committee. I commend him and his colleagues on the Finance Committee for dealing as expeditiously as they did with this trade package. This is the only piece of trade legislation I am aware of that we will deal with in this session of this Congress. I am hopeful that a good, strong majority of our colleagues will support these two provisions on the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act.

First, let me share some factual information so people can put this whole effort into context. Today, the Caribbean countries and the Central American nations comprise about 1.9 percent of all of the imports that come into the United States, 1.9 percent total.

Of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa that will be affected by this legislation if it is adopted, more than 700 million people who are the poorest in the world, live in these 48 countries. These countries make up .86 percent of 1 percent of textile and apparel imports to the United States. So between the 48 countries and more than 700 million people in the sub-Saharan Africa region and the 24 countries that make up the Caribbean Basin and the Central American nations, we are talking about something around 2.75 percent of imports that come into the United States.

We are talking about millions of people who live in these nations. We have a provision that would allow for the duty-free import of products that come out of these two parts of the world. But it isn't just duty free. It doesn't mean anything they produce automatically comes to this country. In this provision, there is a very important clause regarding textiles, which is the source of most of the argument, I think. The distinguished Senator from Delaware can correct me if I am wrong, but I think the textile provisions are probably provoking the most debate. In the textile provisions, we say that the fabric and the thread that is used to assemble the product in the 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the 24 countries in the Caribbean, that fabric and that thread must be made in the United States. You can then assemble the product in these other countries and it will come into the United States.

Why is that important? Today, we have a massive amount of imports that come into this country from the Pacific Rim, Asian countries. There is no such requirement in those trade agreements, while there are quotas. In the year 2005, the quotas come off entirely. If we don't pass the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, by 2005, we are going to find our markets flooded by products made in the Pacific Rim, where there is no U.S. content requirement.

There are some 400,000 jobs in this country that make fabric and make the thread used in the production of these textile products that would come out of Africa and the Caribbean Basin. If we don't pass this legislation, those 400,000 jobs are in jeopardy. That is why this bill is important. First and foremost, this bill is important to America. As with any piece of legislation, the first consideration is, does it do any good or do no harm, but most especially, does it do any good for the people of the United States of America? I argue this bill is critically important to the well-being of almost a half million workers in the United States. Our failure to enact this legislation places those 400,000 jobs in jeopardy.

There are other reasons why I think this is important, aside from our own interests. We spent $6 billion of U.S. taxpayer money in the 1980s in one of these Caribbean Basin countries, El Salvador; $6 billion from the U.S. Treasury went to finance a war basically in the one country of El Salvador. Today, there are some 335,000 Salvadorans living in the United States. In fact, there are 1 million illegal aliens from the 24 Caribbean Basin countries living in the United States. And every day, more come.

Why do they come here? Why did my great-grandparents come here? Why do the grandparents of parents of most people, with the exception of African Americans, come to America? My great-grandparents left Ireland not because they did not love Ireland any longer. It was because they were discriminated against. They couldn't get work. They weren't allowed to be educated. So they were left with no choice but to leave the country they loved to come to America. That is true for millions and millions of people in this country.

Why do Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, people of the Dominican Republic and other nations leave to come here? It is not because they don't love their own countries, but the opportunities in these nations are almost nonexistent in many cases. That is why they come here. Do you want to stop that flood from coming? You have to create economic opportunity or that flood is going to continue, as sure as I am standing here.

This effort doesn't solve that problem entirely. It would be ludicrous to suggest it would. But it would start to create economic opportunities in these countries that would allow their people to have some future without looking for the next boat or raft or plane in which to escape the economic deprivation they see in their own nation and to seek what millions have done over the years; that is, to come to this land of opportunity. If we are going to stem that tide, we have to begin by creating economic opportunity, or at least assisting in that process. I think this bill attempts to do that and does begin that process.

Let me remind my colleagues that many of these Caribbean countries over the last few years have been devastated by natural disaster.

These hurricanes that have swept across these islands and across these countries have left thousands homeless, without any future whatsoever.

I recall that only about a year ago at this time, or a little less--actually in early November of last year--I flew down to Nicaragua, after the hurricane hit there, with the wife of our Vice President, Mrs. Gore, Tipper Gore, and a group of Members of Congress. We went down for a weekend to help out with the international relief organizations to try to see what we could do as volunteers to provide some assistance.

I will never forget, there were six or seven of us inside a one-room schoolhouse in Nicaragua, outside of Managua. It took us an entire day with shovels to shovel out the mud in a one-room schoolhouse. That is how thick it was. It took six people almost an entire day to shovel the mud out of what had been a one-room schoolhouse a few days earlier.

We were looking over a small community that had just been devastated, with tent cities going up. Most of them were made of whatever scrap pieces of metal and cardboard people could find.

So we talk about these neighbors of ours to the immediate south in this hemisphere who have been devastated by these natural disasters and events and our efforts to try to help them get back on their feet. We could write a check, although I suspect we would not come up with $6 billion in aid relief, as we did during the guerrilla conflict in Central America, for one country. We probably could not get that passed.

What we can do is try to provide some opportunity for jobs to be created, using U.S. content product, that would put some people to work in these countries, which keeps people working in America, and will provide some ray of hope for millions of people in these countries.

I commend the chairman of the Finance Committee and those who worked with him. This is a good bill. It is not perfect, and there may be some amendments that would be offered. My good friend and colleague from Wisconsin, Senator Feingold, has an idea that is a different approach to what is included in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. I like what he is going to propose. I don't know if he will offer it as an amendment or not. My concern is that it probably would not pass. It has a factor of aid written into it, and I don't think there are 51 votes for a massive aid package here, nor does it exist in the House.

So while I like what he proposes, I am concerned that would not make it, and what we have here, I think, can. I am attracted to what he is suggesting, but I don't necessarily believe that is going to be the answer in terms of how to do it. In the long term, it is creating economic opportunity in these countries that makes the most difference.

We now have a balance of payment and trade in the 24 Caribbean countries that is positive. We talk about a mounting trade deficit, and it is true; but now if we are going to attack the trade deficit, we are aiming at the wrong target.

To give you an idea where the numbers are, in the last several years, the trade surplus with the 24 Caribbean Basin countries is over $2 billion. In the first 6 months of 1999, the surplus stands at $830 million for this year alone. That is getting near $3 billion in a trade surplus with these 24 countries.

It seems to me, if you want to deal with the trade deficit, maybe you ought to be aiming your sights on other parts of the world, although I am not advocating you do it. But if you do, that is where we ought to be looking. We have a trade surplus, and it is only a small amount of imports; 1.9 percent of the total imports come out of these 24 countries. Nonetheless, we have a trade surplus.

It seems to me that trying to expand trading opportunities is one of the few bright spots around the globe when it comes to expanding job opportunities here by providing new markets where

American-produced products can be sold.

With regard to these African countries, all of us have seen these photographs. You don't have to go to Africa or necessarily become a great student of what is going on in the sub-Saharan region. But anybody with even a passing awareness of what has happened to these countries over the last number of years has to be moved by it. They have to be moved by what they see.

When you see more than 700 million people living under the most abject conditions of poverty imaginable in the world, with less than 1 percent of textile and apparel imports coming from those 700 million people--I think .86 percent is the number; that is all it is coming into this country. If we can't say to these 700 million people in these 48 countries, look, take our fabric and our threads, and if you can produce a product to sell into this country, keeping the jobs here at home and enhancing your economic opportunities, then what do we stand for? How else do we really, in the long term, provide assistance to these people?

Does anybody really believe we are going to take out a check and write out an aid program to provide assistance to this many people in those countries? I don't think so. Ironically, only two of the countries in the sub-Saharan region have any kind of trading relationship with us at all. The other 46 have virtually no trading relationship. While this bill would potentially affect 48 countries, in fact, only 2 of the 48 really have any kind of involvement in terms of trading. Again, it is almost exclusively in the textile area.

Again, I will make the point I tried to make at the outset. This bill, first and foremost, is good for this country. In the year 2005, the quotas come off. Again, my colleague from Delaware has forgotten more about this issue than I know. He can correct me if I am wrong. In the year 2005, as I understand it, the quotas on trade from the Pacific rim come off. There are no content requirements, as I understand it, with product produced in the Pacific rim.

So if we don't provide an offsetting market to the Pacific rim market in the Caribbean Basin Initiative in the sub-Saharan region, come the year 2005, the people today who produce the fabric and produce the threads that would be used to produce the products out of the nations affected by this bill would have their jobs in jeopardy because that content requirement is not there on the Pacific rim nations. The quotas do come off, and we could be adversely affected, in my view, by such an event. So it is going to be critically important that we start to build up an alternative market that has U.S. content requirements in it.

I know some of my colleagues have raised the issue of labor standards. They are legitimate issues to raise. I point out that, to the best of my knowledge, all 24 countries in the Caribbean Basin Initiative are signatories to the international labor agreements. They are already on the line for supporting those labor standards. There is a legitimate issue about enforcement of the standards; that is a separate issue.

But the fact is, there are labor standards here. The issue is whether or not you can enforce them and see to it that people are going to be protected to the extent possible by those labor standards. I hope we will figure out a mechanism to enforce the standards in those laws. The laws do exist to require these countries to meet those labor standards.

Again, I commend those who have been involved. I will have more to say on the bill as the debate moves forward.

For those who think that somehow this is a giveaway, this is just a favor we are doing for people who live in the island nations of the Caribbean or the Central American countries, nothing could be further from the truth. This bill is good for America. It protects jobs in America, expands growth and opportunity for businesses to be able to sell into these markets.

The best social welfare program is a job. That is the best social welfare program. Nothing does more for a nation, for a family, or for an individual than to give them an opportunity to have a job, where they are self-sufficient and providing for their families and themselves. This proposal that increases a trading opportunity with these poor countries in Central America and the Caribbean and in the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa gives them an opportunity to have a job which, in the long-term, is what preserves democracy and creates the kind of wealth and education necessary for nations to prosper and to grow.

Again, with only 1.9 percent of all the imports coming from the Caribbean, those 24 countries, and less than 1 percent of textiles and apparel coming from the 48 nations in the sub-Saharan Africa nations, I think this country of ours and the Senate should support this initiative and say to the nations and the people: We want you to be partners with us. We want you to have the chance to provide for your own people.

We want to do so without costing jobs for hard-working Americans. This bill does both of those things, and for those reasons is richly deserving of the support and votes of Members of the Senate.

For those reasons, I urge adoption of this bill when the appropriate time comes to vote aye.