Top 141 NAFTA Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

In all fairness to Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, when she started talking about this, it was really very recently. She's been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn't she made the [trade] agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective.

NAFTA, by itself, will not collapse. The possibility is that the United States leaves the treaty, but the treaty itself would keep regulating relations between Canada and Mexico.

The whole idea of a trade deal is to build a fence around participants inside and give them an advantage over the outside. So there's a conceptual flaw in that, one of many conceptual flaws in NAFTA.

This softwood lumber dispute is a very old dispute that almost follows a dynamic entirely of its own that is actually somewhat independent of the issues of the issues that are bothering the president Donald Trump on NAFTA.

Take a look at NAFTA, one of the worst deals ever made by any country having to do with economic development. It's economic un development as far as America is concerned.

If NAFTA goes away, it's not the end of the world. It certainly is not the end of trade between Mexico and the United States.

NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.

I do think there would be a receptivity to somebody who campaigned in a straightforward, cohesive way, supporting an increase in the minimum wage, being for universal health care for all Americans, and opposing trade agreements like NAFTA.

On NAFTA, the Canadian Parliament... is united. We have our partisan differences. When we hold the government to account, as is our role in our parliamentary system, we will absolutely point out what we think they should be doing differently. But when it comes to our relationship with the United States, we do speak with one voice.

Bill Clinton was for NAFTA. I heard him over in Tokyo he came out all said it was a great bill. Secretary Clinton was for it. She called it the gold standard when she was secretary of state.

Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward ... an eventual merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the criticisms appear to be justified.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before NAFTA went into effect, there were 285,000 auto workers in Michigan. Today, that number is only 160,000.

The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

NAFTA stripped us of manufacturing jobs. We lost our jobs. We lost our money. We lost our plants. It is a disaster.

There was a hope then by some people that what we call trickle-down economics would work. That if you made the economy pie bigger, everybody would benefit. Twenty-five years after NAFTA, we know that that is not true. We should have known then that it was not true.

NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.

Don't forget, a lot of people want that to happen because they make a lot of money by taking money out of this country. Those deals [like NAFTA] are very good for a lot of people.

NAFTA recognizes the reality of today's economy - globalization and technology. Our future is not in competing at the low-level wage job; it is in creating high-wage, new technology jobs based on our skills and our productivity.

NAFTA is a horrible agreement, one of the worst trade deals ever. It's just one of the worst. Although TPP, which I terminated before it got signed - before it got finished, someday hopefully people will be thanking. That would have been one of the great disasters of all times, in terms of trade.

The U.S.-Mexico border has often been described as an open wound. NAFTA was expected to heal it, albeit through a long, slow, and imperfect scarring process, by creating a basic framework for cooperation between the two countries.

During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With NAFTA and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur.

Some of the younger people afford hope for the future. I am not opposed to reform initiatives. For example, if you can build up enough popular support in the United States to put through a reasonable health care program or to support the rights of the working people against the version of NAFTA which was rammed through, these can be good things.

Specifically, the U.S. holds strength. Its own context makes it a very competitive country, but I believe that if we recognize how interdependent the U.S. with its neighbors from the North and the South, we are part of NAFTA, a trade agreement.

When it [NAFTA] was sold, we were supposed to get two or three times more exports to Canada or Mexico than they exported to us. It's been the exact opposite.

We know that trade, NAFTA, the free and open trade between Canada and the U.S. creates millions of good jobs on both sides of the border.

We have the most incompetently worked trade deals ever negotiated probably in the history of the world, and that starts with NAFTA. And now they want to go TPP, one of the great disasters.

Some really large businesses that get a lot from China would like a NAFTA Superhighway system because it would reduce costs for them to transport containers from China and, as a result, increase their margins.

As for the expected boon to the Mexican economy, we have seen none of these gains, and instead we have seen NAFTA's detrimental impact on the Mexican workers.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is a continuation of other disastrous trade agreements, like NAFTA, CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

I am all in favor of growing the American economy and engaging in trade with the world, but not at the expense of American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement is a perfect example of this. Ask the textile workers of North Carolina how NAFTA worked out for them - if you can find any.

NAFTA was conceived to avoid discrimination against goods. A U.S.-Mexico treaty on immigration should be devised to prevent discrimination against people.

During the early 1990s, Mexico's domestic political sensitivities meant that it rarely extradited people who had committed crimes in the U.S. After NAFTA, extradition numbers began to increase until they surpassed 100 a year in the late 2000s.

Now, given the experience that we have had thus far, with our subsequent trade agreements with NAFTA and others, you would think that with our experience of job loss that we have had there that when you find yourself in a hole that you might stop digging.

In Illinois, we've seen job losses from agreements like CAFTA and NAFTA. Those agreements didn't help American workers - and they haven't brought improvements to the lives of workers in other countries, either.

Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country or, frankly, any other country. Never, ever again.

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

America has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA, a deal signed by Bill Clinton and supported strongly by Hillary Clinton. And by the way, the single worst trade deal ever made in history anywhere.

Let me first clarify that NAFTA is a trilateral agreement. The decision of walking away is not of Mexico or Canada. The decision of walking away is of the U.S.

I don't think that if Justin Trudeau came back from the NAFTA negotiations with a new clause - 'Oh, by the way, there's going to be a new legislature that Americans will send members to that will pass laws that will bind Canada' - I don't believe Canada would ever go for that.

In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow, or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday.

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA politically, setting the stage for a North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

If we don't get the deal we want, we leave NAFTA and start over to get a much better, a much more fair deal because right now, we're a one-way highway into Mexico, a one-way highway .

[Bill Clinton] approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.

Donald Trump has been rejecting the idea of trade agreements like NAFTA, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

North Carolina's industrial workers have been crushed by Bill Clinton's signing of NAFTA supported by crooked Hillary Clinton.

In a way, NAFTA is like a scrambled egg. How do you unscramble an egg? The value chains are so interwoven that it would be very difficult to do that. But government policies force us to look for ways to unscramble it.

I think partly the decline in the peso was due to worry about renegotiation of NAFTA, but I think we also need to think about some other mechanisms for making the peso/dollar exchange rate a bit more stable.

I share the skepticism that my friends have about NAFTA. It was woefully weak in protecting workers and on the enforcement side. The question is can we meaningfully build a trade regime that has as its North Star protecting American workers and American jobs through meaningful enforcement? I think we can.

The economic insecurity of the past ten to 15 years, the 2008 Wall Street crash, NAFTA, and the loss of millions of good jobs - these directly grow out of Democratic Party neo-liberal policies.

Our jobs are being taken out by the deal that Hillary Clinton's husband signed, NAFTA, one of the worst deals ever. Our jobs are being sucked out of our economy.

Hoosiers have seen good paying jobs leave our state for decades because of NAFTA and other bad trade deals from Washington. President Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating tool to fix these problems that have been baked into the international economy for decades.

Like so many free trade deals before and since, Nafta was sold as a massive opportunity for working people and their prospects. Forecasts spoke of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in all three countries. The reality could not have been more different.

We recognize that NAFTA is a three-country agreement, and we need a three-country negotiation.

I would like to believe that TPP will lead to more exports and jobs for the American people. But history shows that big trade agreements - from NAFTA to the Korea Free Trade Agreement - have resulted in fewer American jobs, lower wages, and a bigger trade deficit.

I think NAFTA has been extremely beneficial to the United States, in many ways, but there's no question after 23 years it needs to be updated, to say the least.

The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.

The problem with NAFTA was with what we wanted. And there, the agenda had been set by our corporations. So what is true is that workers in the United States and workers in the developing countries were often disadvantaged. They were worse off. The big winners were our corporations.

It certainly was difficult to sell NAFTA because it's always difficult to sell open markets.

This region [North Carolina] used to be the furniture manufacturing hub of the world. I know because I bought plenty. But the NAFTA deal and then China's entry into the World Trade Organization, another Bill[Clinton] and Hillary[Clinton] backed disaster, have sent those jobs to other countries.