Speaker. while trade sanctions and serious remedies are granted to the commercial trade and investment provisions of these free trade agreements. the labor and environmental standards are totally ineffectual. It is interesting to me that the negotiators can get good protections for intellectual property rights and other commercial rights. but when it comes to labor and environmental standards. it is just not happening. I want to address the House especially within the context of the immigration problem that we are running up against in recent days. We have folks that are tunneling into our country from Mexico. They are swimming across rivers. They are hiding in containers from foreign countries and dying in the process of trying to get here. number one. to get out of the countries that they are in because they are in a troubled state and they know they have got no rights: secondly. to give their families hope in coming here. It seems to me. if we wanted to stop some of the immigration problems. we could include in our trade agreements provisions that protect those workers in their own countries. Then maybe they would not be lining up to come to this country with hopes of getting out of that situation. Secondly. we also talk a lot that we have got a major effort in Iraq. and the President of the United States has described it in many cases as an effort to export democracy.
Keywords matched
immigration