For 50 years the John Birch Society and its publications, including THE NEW AMERICAN, have been standing for family and freedom. In the early years of the JBS, Robert Welch, founder of the society, spoke and wrote repeatedly these words: “We actually intend to save for our children and their children as much as possible of the glorious country and humane civilization which we ourselves inherited.”

We Americans have been blessed with “a glorious country and humane civilization” for over 200 years. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, have provided the basis for our lives of freedom in a prosperous and independent nation. However, the accelerating problem of job losses and lowered wages for Americans in recent times leads us to wonder whether our heritage of freedom and prosperity can be sustained, and if not, why not.

As the previous articles in this issue have described, job losses and wage suppression are closely related to wrongheaded immigration, trade, and regulatory policies. Since under our Constitution, all legislative powers are vested in Congress, including the power to regulate immigration and commerce, we don’t have far to look to get to the root of the problem.

Root of the Problem

Congress passed legislation in the 1960s that has led to greatly increased legal immigration. Then, in 1986, Congress approved an amnesty for illegal immigrants and promised that it would be a one-time amnesty. Since then, Congress has allowed massive illegal immigration to occur to the extent that estimates of illegals within the United States range from 12 million to 30 million. Now congressional leaders are working with the Bush administration to craft yet another amnesty to legalize the status of this new generation of illegal immigrants.

The solution to preventing further job losses and wage suppression due to illegal immigration is for sufficient numbers of Americans to work together to convince Congress to enforce our present immigration laws, improve our border security, and reject all amnesty and guest-worker bills.

And that’s just the area where we need to start. Although illegal immigration has been an important factor in job losses and wage suppression, the effects of trade agreements and federal taxes and regulations have been greater. More specifically, congressional passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and legislation establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 have already led to the loss of millions of jobs for Americans and have set the stage for still larger numbers of job losses.

Almost incomprehensibly, massive American job loss is not the worst effect of these trade agreements. Even though NAFTA has cost millions of Americans their jobs over the past 13 years, it holds an even more ominous consequence: it is a founding document for the present-day development of a North American Union between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which threatens to take away Americans’ rights and freedoms by subordinating our country and all its laws, both at the national and local level, to a new North American political entity similar to the European Union. Within that entity, our priceless Constitution would become a relic of the past.

Furthermore, the damage to our economy owing to NAFTA is small compared to the future damages that are in store for us if our nation remains a member of the WTO, the international-enforcement organization for what our politicians call “free trade” — which is really extremely regulated trade that benefits those nations and industries chosen by international bureaucrats at the expense of other nations and industries.

The unfolding economic train wreck in America is being sped along by the fact that the rapid, world-wide development of the Internet is enabling the outsourcing of not only our manufacturing jobs but our service-type jobs. Writing in his March 20, 2006 paper “Economics: Perils of a Different Globalization,” free-trade advocate, Stephen S. Roach, stated:

Bluecollar workers in factories have, of course, long been on the front line in facing the ups and downs of business cycles, as well as the intensification of global pressures. By contrast, white-collar workers in services-based enterprises have not. That is now changing. The rules of engagement on the battleground of globalization are being rewritten. The services economy is now on the leading edge of feeling the stresses and strains of an increasingly competitive and open world economy.

The first service jobs to offshore were the Information Technology (IT) jobs. They leave in groups of thousands. Amazingly, at the same time that the United States is hemorrhaging hi-tech IT jobs and Americans face the loss of tens of millions more U.S. services jobs, the office of the Bush administration’s U.S. Trade Representative is continuing to negotiate concessions regarding trade in services with other nations under the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Full U.S. acquiescence to GATS would result in letting the 150-member WTO have complete jurisdiction over all U.S. laws having to do with service work, including, but not limited to, allowing virtually unlimited numbers of foreign citizens into the United States (as employees of foreign companies) in competition for jobs with U.S. citizens.

When the WTO was established in 1994, it included international agreements on trade in products and trade in services. Basically, negotiations are still underway between the United States and other WTO member nations regarding reciprocal concessions to make trade in services between these nations even easier. Even though negotiations are ongoing, our government made extraordinary concessions in the original GATS agreement when Congress approved our membership in the WTO in 1994. Here’s how an official WTO training video described GATS in 2000:

The main thing that strikes you about the [Trade in] Services Agreement when you look at it, is that it is extraordinarily comprehensive, and on the face of it, extremely demanding.... All measures [laws and regulations of member nations] affecting trade in services are covered. And there’s no qualification of that.

Steps Forward

The bottom line of all this discussion of job losses, immigration, technology, international organizations, and Congress is this: key votes by Congress over the past few decades on immigration, trade agreements, taxes, and regulations have favored international organizations, foreign nations, foreign citizens, and multinational corporations over average American citizens. Congressional action has played a powerful role in the de-industrialization of the United States and has set up our services industry for future job losses in the tens of millions through both offshoring and GATS concessions under the WTO.

The way to preserve both freedom and jobs in America is to organize sufficient, sustained grass-roots pressure on Congress. Congress is the key to preserving our “glorious country and humane civilization.”
For specific actions to take to put pressure on Congress and to learn more about trade agreements and job loss in the United States, go to www.JBS.org/freedom. If you would like to learn more about the John Birch Society, visit www.FreedomAndJobs.org.

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