PERSPECTIVE: FREE TRADE / LIBRE COMERCIO : Big Deal, Unknown Consequences : Mexican-Americans should have input on this critical treaty--but first, they need answers to some basic questions.

Debate on the trilateral free-trade agreement involving Canada, the United States and Mexico is heating up in Washington, but there have been hardly any reverberations in the Southwest, even though it would affect the Mexican-American community, both positively and negatively. There have been no studies, no polls; even worse, there are hardly any solid facts. But there are a lot of radical opinions, pro and con. The national leadership of labor has organized a pretty strong effort to derail the free-trade agreement, and the White House is orchestrating its counterattack. As the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland exposes in public letters his abysmal ignorance regarding the border and attempts to make us believe he is concerned for the Mexican working class, President Bush holds breakfasts and lunches to lobby the wealthiest Latinos in the land.

In the meantime, the people who would experience the consequences are kept in the dark by a Latino leadership that reacts too slowly in a time of fast decisions.

There is no doubt: The Latino community will experience change if the free-trade agreement is signed. That is why it is imperative to begin immediately a debate on the social, economic, environmental and moral impact of the proposal.

To start the debate, we should define the issues, obtain the proper information and ask the right questions. This we will attempt to do in a series of articles beginning here, hopefully to provide a springboard for meaningful discussion.

On the economic front there are several areas to consider.

Dozens of furniture-making businesses have already moved from East Los Angeles to Baja California because of environmental restrictions. The parent company of a major cannery in Watsonville has relocated its operations to central Mexico. In both instances, jobs held by Mexican-Americans have been lost, and the fear in the barrio is that this trend would accelerate under a free-trade agreement that encourages relocation of businesses in Mexico or diversion of U.S. investment capital there.

There is hope that the better-educated Mexican-Americans could push to develop the border into an international trade zone. But given the limited infrastructure in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and the scarcity of capital nationally, how likely is it that this dream could become a reality?

Immigration--although it is now excluded as a subject of the free-trade agreement--is another question without new answers that seems to be on everybody’s minds. The only certainty is that the immigration flow from Mexico will continue as long as the factors First of an occasional series that cause it remain. Some have even suggested that massive relocation of low-skill jobs to Mexico could create new waves of internal immigration by Mexican-American workers from the border to locations farther north in the United States.

There also are areas beneath the surface of free trade that pose delicate moral issues with potential for creating conflict. Take, for instance, agriculture. There is no doubt that this issue will pit Mexicans against Mexicans. There cannot be a win-win situation when you have Mexicans working on the same crops in Mexico as undocumented workers work on in Southern California and Mexican-Americans work on in Central and Northern California.

On the other hand, several important Mexican firms are investing in the United States, creating jobs and, in some respects, influencing cultural habits here--and not only among Mexican-Americans.

Regarding the environment, there are also transcending issues that raise profound questions. Is the environment a non-economic issue? What sort of impact will free trade have on health and the environment in both countries? Should the environmental rules that apply to an economically developed country apply equally to one that is still underdeveloped?

Three weeks ago, the Tomas Rivera Center in San Antonio, Tex. organized a seminar on the free-trade issue with academics, business people and community leaders, under the direction of Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of that city. The consensus was that a free-trade treaty would be, mostly, a formalization of the economic integration that has been taking place on the border. That was “probably a good thing,” the seminar concluded, “so long as an effort was made to capture the gains and protect the losses within the Mexican-American community.”

There must be many debates along these lines. Let us ask the pertinent questions and avoid the generalizations that give the free-trade proposal a dimension it does not have. If the treaty is signed, it will not cure all of Mexico’s economic ills, and if it is not signed, it will not be the economic ruin of Mexico, either. We should not charge the bill of the global economy to Mexico alone. In terms of job displacement, for instance, we should not blame Mexico; in the global economy, jobs will move to Tijuana or to Taiwan if the wages in Tucson or Tustin are comparatively higher.

The least we can do is to call the bluff of people like Kirkland. As U.S. labor’s veteran job protectionist, he is quite likely Mexico’s working class’ public enemy No. 1. When he claims to be fighting free trade to prevent the “exploitation” of Mexican workers at the hands of the ruthless American capitalists, something is rotten in the state of the unions.