EoW November 2007

Transat lant ic Cable

Mr Jedwab also noted that those choosing Canada over the US have the highest levels of education. These are not, he said, ‘people who can’t get a job in the States.’ While Americans moving to Canada are still outnumbered by Canadians going in the opposite direction, the imbalance is shrinking. Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States – a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005.

the long-haul Mexican truck traffic, arguing that there would be inadequate oversight of the drivers. They also claimed that a hasty and ill-considered effort to wrench the US into full compliance with provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would put public safety in jeopardy. NAFTA requires that all roads in the United States, Mexico, and Canada be open to carriers from all three countries. Canadian trucking companies have had full access to American roads right along, but Mexican trucks have been permitted to travel only about 20 miles inside the US from a few border crossings such as those at San Diego (California) and El Paso (Texas). The court declined to forestall the effort to put the preferential treatment to the test. In a brief order released shortly before the start of the long Labor Day weekend, a three-judge panel in San Francisco denied the request for an emergency motion to block the pilot programme. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration had said earlier that it expected to open the border to Mexican trucks as early as the following week.

Over objections, long-distance Mexican trucks may ply American roads for a year

A federal appellate court on 31 st August refused to issue a temporary order to block a Bush administration ‘demonstration project’ allowing as many as 100 Mexican trucking companies to freely haul their cargo anywhere within the US for one year. The decision by the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9 th District cleared the way for the controversial pilot programme for testing the safety of Mexican trucks on US highways. The Teamsters union, the Sierra Club (an environmental group), the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen, and other American opponents of the project had filed suit to prohibit

Dorothy Fabian USA Editor

40

EuroWire – November 2007

Made with