The U.S. Senate Finance Committee will hold a special meeting at a San Antonio hotel today, to discuss the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The Senators will gather at the Marriott Plaza Hotel, near where the treaty was initialed by President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico in 1992.
Numerous business leaders will testify about the critical importance of NAFTA to Texas and the U.S. economy, among them San Antonio Chamber of Commerce President Richard Perez.
"My goal is to be able to testify to how NAFTA has affected us in the areas of retail, energy, manufacturing, and resulting in tangible numbers of jobs," Perez said.
President Trump made NAFTA one of the key issues of his 2016 campaign, calling it a bad trade deal and demanding its repeal. One of the Senators who is expected to be in attendance at today's hearing, Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey, represents a state which voted for Trump, largely due to concerns raised by Trump about jobs being lost to Mexico due to NAFTA.
Perez says his goal today will be to counter those claims.NAFTA has resulted in Texas becoming, by far, the largest exporting state in the country. If Texas were a separate nation, it would be the 20th largest exporting country.NAFTA is credited with job gains in Texas in manufacturing, tech, and energy. The decision by Toyota to locate its truck manufacturing plant in San Antonio in 2003 was, in part, due to NAFTA.
Experts say the job losses that Trump blamed on 'bad trade agreements' are far more likely to have been caused by the growth of technology in manufacturing.
But Perez says NAFTA is in the process of being renegotiated, and he says the negotiators are on the right path.
"It sounds like, at least the folks who are negotiating the agreement, are being more thoughtful in their work, particularly from the United States," he said.
The renegotiation is due to a number of factors. E-commerce and tech essentially did not exist when NAFTA was first negotiated in the early 1990s. In addition, Mexico has freed up its oil and gas industry to international companies, and the fracking boom in the USA promises to turn the United States into the world's largest energy exporter, all factors which will be important in the trade of the coming decades.