Steps away from this week’s NAFTA trade negotiations, business unified in hopes of sending a singular message: do no harm.

Representatives from the United States, Canada and Mexico convened behind closed doors at a Washington hotel in an effort to strike a new North American Free Trade Agreement. And not far away, industry representatives from all three nations sat waiting and hoping to influence the talks.

After two days of meetings, lobbyists admitted privately that they remained mostly in the dark, swapping rumors about dates and times of future meetings but unsure what progress was being made in the first round of discussions. The meetings were largely expected to be procedural, with little discussion on substance in the early days.

The decision to renegotiate NAFTA has largely been driven by politics, chiefly U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this year threatened to withdraw entirely.

Business, on the other hand, has largely praised the agreement and hopes to persuade all three governments to make minimal changes to the pact.

More than $1 trillion in trade

U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade has quadrupled since NAFTA took effect in 1994, surpassing $1 trillion in 2015.

“We’re all in the same boat,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. “In the end we all serve primarily the U.S. consumer. So if you’re going to raise the cost structure, or if you’re going to change the dynamic flow of goods or people in those three countries, you’re really hurting the cost to market for the U.S. customer.”

The U.S. had an autos and auto parts trade deficit of $74 billion with Mexico last year, without which, there would have been a U.S. trade surplus

The United States had a much smaller $5.6 billion automotive trade deficit with Canada last year, but autos was the still a major component of an $11.8 billion overall U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada last year. But including services trade, the United States ran an overall surplus with Canada.

Volpe’s counterparts from the United States and Mexico were also on hand, with hopes of presenting a united front not to see a disruption to the auto industry.

Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, stopped by the talks hotel to chat with negotiators, answer questions and “glean information” about U.S. negotiating objectives.

However, he said insights into the talks were hard to come by, as negotiating teams had not yet revealed details of their proposals to each other.

“There are a lot of poker-faces around here,” he said.

Lobbyists always nearby

He wasn’t the only American lobbyist floating in and out of the hotel. Some held lunch meetings in the hotel restaurants and then returned to their downtown offices. From mining, to textiles to dairy farmers, various groups held sideline meetings.

About 100 business representatives from Mexican companies waited in a meeting room to see if there were any questions negotiators might have for them. And Canadian industry groups mostly worked on their own.

For the most part, the business groups presented a united front.

Juan Pablo Castanon, president of the Mexican business group Consejo Coordinador Empresarial, said his group has been working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for three years. After the November U.S. elections, they began working to tout the benefits of NAFTA.

“The level of contact and communication is intense and one of collaboration,” Castanon said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in Washington that represents companies big and small across the country, confirmed they plan to attend all the sessions, where they expect to hold sideline meetings with other business groups and government officials. The Chamber may also hold sideline events or briefings during future discussions.

Even industry groups who weren’t in agreement with their North American counterparts found other stakeholders to discuss common ground.

The Canadian Dairy Farmers are at odds with their American counterparts, but still found a chance to talk, said the Canadian group’s spokeswoman Isabelle Bouchard.

“To have discussions with counterparts within our own industry and even different industries who are in similar situations than us, it’s important, and we have seen though past trade negotiations how important it is,” Bouchard said.

 
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Auto industry groups from Canada, Mexico and the United States are pushing back against the Trump administration’s demand for higher U.S. automotive content in a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement.

At talks underway this week in Washington, automaker and parts groups from all three countries were urging negotiators against tighter rules of origin, said Eduardo Solis, president of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.

But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer confirmed the industry’s fears that the administration of President Donald Trump was seeking major changes to these rules to try to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.

“Rules of origin, particularly on autos and auto parts, must require higher NAFTA content and substantial U.S. content. Country of origin should be verified, not ‘deemed,’” Lighthizer said on Wednesday in opening remarks.

Fiat Chrysler, Ford, GM represented

Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland both said they were not in favor of specific national rules of origin within NAFTA — a position that the industry agrees with.

“We certainly think a U.S.-specific requirement would greatly complicate the ability of companies, particularly small- and medium-size enterprises, to take advantage of the benefits of NAFTA,” said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council.

The trade group represents Detroit automakers General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler.

His comments were echoed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

“Anytime you say this list or a part of this list has to come from one specific country you’re going to hurt all three countries,” he said.

Deficits can’t continue to grow

The United States had an autos and auto parts trade deficits of $74 billion with Mexico and $5.6 billion with Canada, both major components of overall U.S. goods trade deficits with its North American neighbors — deficits that Lighthizer said could no longer continue.

Lighthizer’s mention of tightening verification requirements is a reference to expanding the parts tracing list, which is used to determine whether companies meet the 62.5 percent North American content requirement for autos and 60 percent for components.

Devised in the early 1990s, the tracing list covers almost none of the sophisticated electronics found in today’s cars and trucks, most of which come from Asia. Putting these on the tracing list could force suppliers to source these components from North America or pay tariffs on them.

Software content a new issue

Volpe said any changes to this must also capture the North American system design work and software content for these components that is not currently included.

“A car today probably has 25 to 30 percent advanced electronics, software content in it. In 1994, it had zero or 1 percent,” Volpe said. “Could you address the tracing to help you get to NAFTA compliance level by capturing some of the work that’s being done in Silicon Valley or Waterloo, Canada? Yes.”

John Bozzella CEO of the Association of Global Automakers, which represents international-brand carmakers, said NAFTA has allowed a major expansion of auto exports, with more than 1 million more vehicles built annually in the United States than in 1993.

“Negotiators should be mindful of this success as they work to modernize the agreement,” Bozzella said, whose organization represents international brand carmakers with U.S. plants, including Toyota, Honda and BMW.

 
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U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Thursday that Washington wants more trade and investment with Latin America, pushing back against perceptions in the region that the Trump administration has an isolationist agenda.

Speaking during a visit to the Panama Canal at the end of a Latin American tour, Pence said the United States was seeking to keep the spirit of the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the pact now being renegotiated in Washington.

Pence said he wanted a NAFTA deal that was a “win, win, win” for the United States, Mexico and Canada, taking a more conciliatory tone than U.S. negotiators who have warned the deal needed a major overhaul to favor U.S. workers.

Pence later reiterated the United States’ concerns about the tense political situation in Venezuela, but took a more measured approach than U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last week, Trump said the United States had “many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

Pence said on Thursday that Venezuela was becoming a dictatorship and that the United States would not stand by while it was destroyed.

He said he was sure the United States, with its allies in Latin America, would find a peaceful solution to the situation in Venezuela.

Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela voiced concern over Venezuela and said that Panama would in the coming days announce measures against it, including immigration actions, to pressure Caracas into restoring democratic order.
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At CareerLink, the state job agency in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, custodial worker and former welder Glenn Hendrickson was looking to change careers. Hendrickson was just beginning his search for a new line of work and he did not yet know what would pique his interest.

But he for sure wasn’t interested in farm work, except as a last resort.

“I’ve had a lot of friends who have had summer jobs, like when they were in high school, picking fruit but I doubt anyone would make a career out of it,” he said.

According to local farm sector employers, most workers are paid well above Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Crew chiefs and foremen on some orchards earn close to $19 per hour. Yet few native-born Americans are willing to do this work, even if unemployed says Alan Dudley, administrator of the Gettysburg CareerLink office.

“The work is difficult, especially in the fields, and it’s not necessarily unskilled work,” he said. “Orchard owners want skilled people to harvest apples so they get the best return on their crop.”

Adams County’s farms, orchards, and processing plants are where the jobs are. The so-called “fruit belt” of vast peach and apple orchards extends across the region’s rolling green hills, along with the packing and processing companies and other agricultural-related businesses.

Tourism, with the 3 million visitors drawn annually to the historic Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, is the other main economic generator.

Adams County’s $580-million fruit industry depends heavily on immigrant labor, which is why the country may be facing an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Businesses in the agricultural-based economy are experiencing labor shortages, and orchard owners are bracing for the possibility of not having enough workers for the fall harvest.

Fleeing workforce

Last month, six Hispanic employees of a county fruit-packing company, which does not want to be identified, were picked up by local police and turned over to immigration agents, who sent them to a detention facility. These and other detentions have had a chilling effect on the county’s Hispanic residents, who make up 6.5 percent of the population of some 100,000 people.

Yet because of the immigration crackdown, workers are not showing up or in some instances, have fled. The local plant of Hillandale Farms, a major national egg producer and distributor, was desperately seeking to fill vacant jobs this summer, according to a company official, because much of its Hispanic work force had disappeared.

As the autumn harvest approaches, the demand for labor is accelerating, Dudley says, not just in the orchards but also in the fruit processing and other agriculture-related industries.

“So they’re coming into their busy hiring season right now. For instance, Knouse Foods just last week posted about eight new positions on our job search website.”

‘No roving checkpoints’

Adams County voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election.

At the Latimore Valley fair in June, which attracted several thousand people to watch antique car races, trucking company secretary Kim Sanders expressed strong support for President Trump’s policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

But, echoing the views of others at the fair who were asked the same question, Sanders wants the law-abiding undocumented immigrants to be able to stay.

“I hate to say it but there are not enough American people to go out and work on a farm, or do planting and pick vegetables like they will,” she said.

Republican Congressman Scott Perry, whose district includes Adams County, has heard the concerns of orchard owners and other businesses in the fruit industry. Perry told VOA his message to them is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has assured him nothing has changed in its enforcement actions.

“There’s not like roving checkpoints,” he said. “They’re targeted enforcement.”

But ICE has changed its policies somewhat. Acting-ICE chief Tom Homan told reporters at the White House last month that “…no populations are off the table. So non-criminals, those who have got a court order from a judge that refuse to leave, we’re looking for.”

Under the last two years of the previous Obama administration, non-criminals were not a priority and were often let go if detained.

Growers such as Kay Hollabaugh are running out of patience. She met last month with Congressman Perry and local lawmakers to express her concerns about the future of the Adams County fruit belt if the immigrant labor force is driven out.

“Those people who are making the laws of our land, eat every day,” she said. “If we could simply stop producing food for a month – OK, no food, no food – I think perhaps that would make some bells go off.”

Ripening fruit

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has galvanized activists in Adams County to press for immigration reform and to lobby local lawmakers to vote against measures that would target immigrant communities.

Jenny Dumont, a Spanish professor at Gettysburg College who leads the immigration lobbying effort for a grassroots group called “Gettysburg Rising, blames the Trump administration’s rhetoric for creating unwarranted fears about the undocumented.

“It’s pretty well documented that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans,” Dumont said. “My sense is that people, if they’ve had contact with immigrants here, that they understand the contributions that they make, they’re able to see them as people not just the label immigrant, the other.”

But Congressman Perry said the border would have to be secured before Americans would agree to any immigration reform measure.

“If you just seal the border without doing some of these other reforms, we’re going to have problems from a business standpoint as well, and I think they get that but again there’s this mistrust,” he said. “They want to see action not words,” the congressman said referring to border security.

As the push and pull over immigration policy plays out, farmers may get some relief as the federal government issues more visas for temporary agricultural workers, mainly from Mexico. The U.S. Labor Department has issued 20 percent more H-2A visas in 2017, compared to last year. Those visas are for seasonal agricultural work, such as harvesting berries, fruit or other crops.

But the visas require require farmers to demonstrate that no Americans will take the jobs they offer. In the meantime, the apple crop is ripening on the trees in Adams County. With harvesting about to begin in less than a month, orchard owners are not sure if enough workers will show up.

Kay Hollabaugh repeated what a top executive of a major food processor told her recently: “’If fruit goes, the Adams County economy falls and we’re out of business.’”
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Here’s how much hope and expectation has been built into the stock market: Big companies are healthy and making fatter profits than Wall Street expected, yet it’s barely enough to keep the market from falling.

Consider Home Depot, which gave an earnings report on Tuesday that was seemingly fantastic. The retailer made more in profit from May through July than in any other quarter in its history, and its 14 percent rise in earnings per share was stronger than analysts expected. Home Depot at the same time raised its profit forecast for this year and reported higher revenue than Wall Street forecast, all of which should be kibble for investors ravenously looking for growth.

Even still, Home Depot’s stock slid 2.7 percent after the report.

That reaction hasn’t been too far off the norm recently, as companies have lined up to report how much they earned during the spring.

Very solid quarter

Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are on pace to report one of their strongest quarters in years. Earnings per share were likely up more than 10 percent from a year earlier, better than the 7 percent that analysts had penciled in when the quarter ended, according to FactSet.

Despite those gains, S&P 500 index funds are nearly exactly where they were before the heart of earnings reporting season began in mid-July.

“Equity markets have greeted positive earnings reports largely with indifference,” strategists at BlackRock wrote in a recent report. “Investor sentiment shows more signs of fatigue than euphoria, even as stock markets have repeatedly reached new heights this year.”

Usually, when a company reports better earnings than analysts expected, it sends the stock higher, at least for a day. Since 2006, such companies have typically done 1.14 percentage points better than the S&P 500 the day following a report’s release, according to Goldman Sachs. But through mid-August of this reporting season, the performance edge has been virtually nil at 0.03 percentage point. That’s the lowest level in at least a decade.

When a company has reported better-than-expected earnings but fallen short of forecasts for revenue, its stock has tended to do worse than the rest of the S&P 500, according to BlackRock. And when a company has missed on both measures? Much worse.

Surprising?

At first blush, such a reaction may be surprising. Stock prices can move up and down for many reasons in the short term: whatever the president is tweeting about, what central banks in far-flung corners of the world are doing or the latest change some hedge fund has made to its trading algorithm. But over the long term, stock prices tend to track closely with corporate profits. When companies are making more money, investors are willing to pay more for each of their shares.

This time may be different because stock prices had already climbed so much in anticipation of higher profits ahead. Even when profits were falling early last year, the S&P 500 index was still holding steady or rising.

One of the main ways analysts use to measure whether stocks are expensive is to compare their price to corporate profits. The S&P 500 is now trading at 20.7 times how much its companies have earned over the last 12 months, according to FactSet. That’s more expensive than its median price-earnings ratio of 15.6 over the last decade.

Now that strong profit growth has returned, it may be mere validation for the gains S&P 500 index funds have already made. And if corporate profits continue to rise faster than stock prices, they’ll look less expensive.

With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, many analysts expect the market’s price-earnings ratio to creep lower from its lofty heights. At the least, many are telling investors to expect the stock market to rise no faster than corporate earnings.

More growth seen

The good news is that Wall Street is expecting profit growth to continue in the second half of this year, though maybe at a slower rate.

Some of the biggest profit gains this year have been coming from companies that do lots of business overseas. That’s because, despite Washington’s push for “America first” policies, companies are seeing some of the strongest growth in markets like Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

In part, it’s because those markets are finally accelerating out of the doldrums they’ve been stuck in for years. The sinking value of the dollar is also helping, because it makes each euro or Mexican peso of sales worth more in dollars than before.

When Ecolab, a company that gets nearly half its revenue from abroad, reported its quarterly results on August 1, it told analysts that global economies in general looked “OK to good” and that it was anticipating a very solid 2017. The company, which provides water, hygiene and other services, reported both earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations for the quarter. Its stock fell 0.2 percent that day.
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Maribel Resendiz and her husband came to the U.S. from Mexico, sold cool drinks to workers in the tomato fields of South Florida and eventually opened a bustling shop in a strip mall offering fruit smoothies and tacos. Now she is preparing for the possibility she’ll have to leave it all behind.

Resendiz, who is not a legal U.S. resident, recently turned over control of the business in Florida City to her daughter, a citizen. The once-proud shop owner is so afraid of deportation these days that on a recent morning she was keeping out of sight of customers while her husband was not there at all.

“I am afraid the police will stop me, call immigration, and they will take me away to Mexico,” Resendiz said while cutting fruit for smoothies.

The couple, who came to the United States in 1992 and have not become legal residents, are among a growing number of business owners with the same status who are scrambling to get their affairs in order amid a crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump.

As many as 10 percent of the 11 million or so immigrants in the United States without legal residency own businesses in the country by some estimates, and many are selling their enterprises, transferring them to relatives or closing altogether to avoid a total loss if they are abruptly deported.

They include people like Mauro Hernandez, a native of Mexico who operates a small chicken takeout and delivery restaurant along immigrant-heavy Roosevelt Avenue in the borough of Queens in New York City. He is now trying to sell.

No hope left

There is Carmen and Jorge Tume, a couple from Peru, who have scaled back their mobile car wash business in Miami because they are so afraid of getting stopped by police and turned over to immigration.

“We don’t have any hope left,” said Carmen Tume, 50. “Everything we built is coming down.”

Hernandez, whose business was registered in the name of a friend who is a legal resident, said he is selling because he doesn’t want his partner to get stuck with it if he is deported.

“Since Trump won, I have been very nervous,” he said.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many are taking such measures, but Jorge Rivera, a lawyer who advises immigrant clients in California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, Texas and other states, sees a clear trend.

“Everyone is taking precautions,” Rivera said. “They don’t want their business to disappear overnight and be left with nothing.”

Several other business owners interviewed by The Associated Press shared similar stories on condition that their names and identifying details not be disclosed, not wanting to alert immigration authorities.

They included a 40-year-old from Mexico who runs a marketing firm in Los Angeles that he said employs 50 people and has annual revenues of about $5 million. He’s making plans to transfer it to relatives who are citizens and move with his family to Spain.

Those selling often see no choice but to take a loss. Under Trump, detentions of immigrants in the country illegally rose 37 percent over the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2016. The administration says it is focused on those with criminal records, but the number of detainees who do not have a criminal history has more than doubled.

Billions in taxes

The businesses in question range widely from one-person cleaning services to restaurants and other operations that employ dozens of people. While hard figures on this hidden part of the economy don’t exist, the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates immigrants in the country without permission contribute $11.7 billion annually in state, local and federal taxes.

People without legal residency can obtain an individual taxpayer identification number and an employer identification number, enabling them to open bank accounts and operate businesses among other things.

Despite the boon for government coffers, advocates for controlling illegal immigration argue that the costs outweigh any benefits and that U.S. law should be enforced.

“They are trying to keep their ill-gotten gains, and the U.S. government should not allow illegal immigrants to own properties or businesses nor transfer them,” said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said it’s incumbent on business owners without legal residency to prepare for the worst: “If they want their business to survive, they are going to have to put a plan in place.”

For Resendiz that meant handing over legal and financial control of the juice store in Florida City, which lies at the southernmost edge of Miami sprawl where strip malls fade into farms and nearby Everglades National Park produces a clientele of thirsty tourists. It has been thanks to that business the family gets by without government assistance, she said.

“I don’t receive food stamps or Medicaid. … I pay my taxes,” Resendiz said. “I don’t live off the government and don’t ask them for anything.”

She said she and her husband never tried to become citizens because they didn’t feel it was necessary — until Trump was elected president. She has since applied and is awaiting a response, nervous over the possibility of having to return to a homeland she left 25 years ago and now barely knows.

“My dreams became my reality because I had my own business,” she said. “Now, I have nothing in my name.”
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A rural county in Pennsylvania is facing the consequences of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, as businesses in the agricultural-based economy experience labor shortages. Some orchard owners and local pro-immigrant activists are lobbying state and federal lawmakers to raise awareness of the contributions by immigrants in a county that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in November. Bill Rodgers has this report on what is happening in Adams County, Pennsylvania.
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