Bill Clinton: “He said there's a big difference of opinion about what will happen in the long and the short run. Even if it's good for…”

“He said there's a big difference of opinion about what will happen in the long and the short run. Even if it's good for us in the long run, will we lose some jobs in the short run? What did we do for people who lost their jobs when I was in Arkansas? And what have we proposed to do with this NAFTA agreement? All good questions. First, let me say what I think will happen in the long and short run, then let me answer the other two questions. And this is a complicated thing. There will still be people from the United States who will vest in factories in Mexico if this agreement goes through. But today when people invest in factories in Mexico, they invest along the American border in factories for the purpose of producing there and selling here. What the Mexicans want is to, in effect, erase that borderline and get investments in Mexico City to put people to work there to produce for the Mexican market, not for the American market. That's what they get out of this deal. And obviously, the more investment they get down there and the more jobs that are created and the more they sell to themselves, the higher their incomes will be and the more they'll be able to spend money on foreign products, too. Today--this is an astonishing thing--Mexico buys more American products per capita than any country in the world except Canada, even though it's still a poor country. That's because 70 percent of all the money they have to spend on foreign products gets spent on American products. So what I think will happen is, there will be more investment by Americans in Mexico, but instead of being along the border to make products to sell back here, it will be down in the country to make products to sell in the country. That will put more people to work. It will stabilize the population. Over the long run it will reduce illegal immigration and will increase their ability to buy our products. Now, will some people be dislocated? Probably, because nearly every trade agreement that creates jobs costs some. When that happened at home, what we did was several things. First of all, we'd go into a community if it had high unemployment and actually offer to invest money at the State level to help attract new industries to that town. Then we would offer to share the cost of training the workers. And if it was a distressed community, we would also give them an enterprise zone that would give extra tax incentives to invest there. What we're doing at the national level is to provide much more money for job retraining, number one. Number two, we're going to set up a development bank to try to get funds for indigenous businesses to start in areas that have been hurt by this, which I think is very important. And number three, we're going to have something we now--we don't call them enterprise zones, we call them empowerment zones at the Federal level--that we're going to locate in some of the most distressed communities in this country that will give huge incentives for people in the private sector to put Americans back to work in high unemployment areas. There is not enough Government money to fix all these problems. You've got to get the private sector to invest and put people back to work. So those are the three things we're working on doing now. That's a very good question.”