Byron Dorgan: “With this amendment, I am requiring the Labor Department to perform a study to determine the number and the types of…”

“With this amendment, I am requiring the Labor Department to perform a study to determine the number and the types of jobs that were lost by the North American Free Trade Agreement. That agreement was done a long while ago, but we are now in the process of considering additional trade agreements--one with Peru, one with Panama, one with South Korea, and one with Colombia. As we bring another group of free-trade agreements--so-called free-trade agreements--to the floor of the Senate, I would like to remind our colleagues there is very little information about what has happened to previous trade agreements except that we know they didn't work out very well, and so we are going to do more of the same. NAFTA, for example--the North American Free Trade Agreement--at the time we did it, we had a modest trade deficit with Canada. Now that has turned into a very large trade deficit with Canada. At the time we did NAFTA, we had a modest surplus, a very small surplus in trade with Mexico. Now we have turned that into a very large trade deficit with Mexico. So we are moving in exactly the wrong direction.”