U.S. Unions Are Wrong on NAFTA : If the pact is defeated, business will continue to exploit cheap labor, and workers on both sides of the border will suffer.

Among opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the most difficult to understand is organized labor. Under Mexico’s maquiladora program, American industry has been relocating to Mexico in preference to other offshore locations since 1968. Despite claims of AFL-CIO leaders, it simply isn’t credible to consider NAFTA a threat to American jobs. For other economic reasons, the jobs have already been lost. If Congress rejects NAFTA, the maquiladora program will still continue.

In the rhetoric against the treaty, organized labor seems to overlook a historical problem confronting union workers of the Southwest. Faced with collective labor action, Southern California’s merchants, manufacturers and growers have repeatedly defeated organized labor by drawing job-hungry replacements into the region from Mexico. NAFTA offers an opportunity to change this.

With its weak economy, an unlimited pool of cheap labor has always been found readily available in Mexico. The workers are highly industrious, willing to work and live under the most deplorable conditions and possess a unique advantage unavailable with U.S.-born employees. When they are no longer needed, they can be sent home.

Twice in the 20th Century, when faced with surplus labor after allowing massive immigration into California, the border has been sealed and Mexican nationals have been deported. In the 1930s, the deportation program was called Repatriation. In the early 1950s, it was Operation Wetback.

Another vivid example is currently taking place. Beginning in the 1960s, farm workers began to organize under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. By the late ‘70s, with Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown’s Administration in Sacramento, it appeared as if California’s historically abusive farm-labor conditions would finally be brought to an end. State-sponsored legislation was effectively bringing about unionization of the state’s agricultural industry.

The industry’s reaction was swift. In a single election in the early 1980s, pro-UFW Democrats were turned out of office. Benefiting from campaigns heavily financed by defense, construction and agriculture industries, George Deukmejian became governor and Pete Wilson was elected to the U.S. Senate.

With support of President Ronald Reagan, immigration barriers were loosened and a flood of Mexican and other Latin American workers poured into the state. The rush to the fields of job-hungry people torpedoed any thoughts by UFW organizers that they would ever be successful in improving the lives of farm workers.

As the northward migration continued, the cities also were affected. Hired into their traditional occupations as domestics, restaurant workers, janitors and gardeners, Mexicans eventually began crowding out members of skilled trade unions. Spanish-speaking workers willing to take low wages were eagerly put to work in the construction industry.

Now, in an amazing but historically predictable turnabout, Gov. Wilson wants to send the Mexican workers home. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of California’s defense-based economy, a large surplus labor condition exists. Mexican workers are no longer needed and are being portrayed as an excessive burden on our social-welfare agencies.

Such has been the pattern of our labor history: using Mexican workers to depress wages in boom times and then sending them back when the cycle ends.

With NAFTA and the reforms being made in Mexico, we have an opportunity to break this pattern so detrimental to interests of working people. After decades of state-controlled industry in a closed economy, Mexico is making an orderly transition to a market-based economy.

In adopting NAFTA, Mexico stands ready to virtually eliminate the country’s highly protectionist import duties and embrace open commerce with North America. By combining enlightened economic policies with the population’s native talent, there is no reason why Mexico will not emerge as a modern economy.

Those who risk everything coming north across our border frequently experience indignities in our culturally different, crime-ridden society. Generally, they work to send money to their families in Mexico. With a strong Mexican economy, the only Mexicans interested in crossing our borders will be tourists. Only then will the old game be over of using people from Mexico as strikebreakers against American workers.