HERE’s WHAT THE USMCA SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION AND MIGRANT LABOR:
Migrant Workers
According to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a total of 396,579 apprehensions were made of people attempting to cross the U.S. southern border with Mexico in fiscal year 2018. That number has more than doubled in 2019. Approximately 851,000 illegal border crossers were been taken into custody by the CBP in fiscal year 2019, which ran from October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019. There is no way to gauge the number of people who succeed at illegally crossing the Southwest border each year. While most cited immigration experts believe that there are around 11 million illegal aliens residing in the United States, one study from Yale University published in June 2018, estimated that were as many as 22.1 million illegal migrants living in the United States in 2016. The actual numbers could be even higher and may increase even further, due in part to certain provisions in the USMCA.
The USMCA’s labor chapter (Chapter 23), as The New American has also previously reported, could serve as a beachhead for a cross-border migration invasion similar to that experienced in the European Union. In language that is virtually identical to that found in the TPP, Article 15.5 of Chapter 15 of the USMCA states: “No party shall adopt or maintain ... a measure that ... imposes a limitation on ... the total number of natural persons that may be employed in a particular financial service sector or that a financial institution or cross-border service supplier may employ ... in the form of numerical quotas or the requirement of an economic needs test.” This opens the door for Mexico and the current radical socialist government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador or for a Mexican, a Canadian, or even a U.S.-based company to sue the U.S. government for restricting the number of employees that such a company would want to bring across the border into the United States.
As well, provisions from USMCA’s Chapters 15 and 23 have the potential to undermine President Trump’s border security measures and further open our nation’s borders. Article 23.8 on “Migrant Workers” requires each country to “ensure that migrant workers are protected under its labor laws, whether they are nationals or non-nationals” of the country they are residing in. The term “non-nationals” could easily apply to not just undocumented aliens or “Dreamers” from Mexico, but also to those illegal migrants arriving from the caravans originating in Central American countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, none of which are parties of the USMCA. Furthermore, such provisions and verbiage could be used in aiding Democratic lawmakers to retain President Obama’s unconstitutional executive action for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, commonly known as DACA. In fact, any adjudication on this matter could very well fall under the judicial jurisdiction of a USMCA panel for dispute settlement, rather than under the legal control of the United States. (More about these dispute settlement panels later).
USMCA inexcusably gave up our sovereignty in some ways worse than the original NAFTA BEFORE the Dems in Congress pulled it more to the left.
Should never have been sanctioned or pushed by this admin at all. Makes me sick whenever Trump touts it as a “success”. It is a national sellout.
(And yeah, Trump is better than anyone else we’ve had since Reagan, who had his own failures on illegal immigration, or that we could have got in 2016.)
Disgusting. This bill needs to die - but who is there to kill it?