NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Bernie Sanders, it is often noted, has never met a free trade deal that he liked. But inhis recent interview with the New York Daily News’s editorial board, the senator from Vermont outlined the trade terms he might find acceptable. His statement should be absolutely chilling to the developing world.

Daily News: Another one of your potential opponents has a very similar sounding answer to, or solution to, the trade situation—and that’s Donald Trump. He also says that, although he speaks with much more blunt language and says, and with few specifics, “Bad deals. Terrible deals. I’ll make them good deals.”

So in that sense I hear whispers of that same sentiment. How is your take on that issue different than his?

Sanders: Well, if he thinks they’re bad trade deals, I agree with him. They are bad trade deals. But we have some specificity and it isn’t just us going around denouncing bad trade. In other words, I do believe in trade. But it has to be based on principles that are fair. So if you are in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 65¢ an hour, or you’re in Malaysia, where many of the workers are indentured servants because their passports are taken away when they come into this country and are working in slave-like conditions, no, I’m not going to have American workers “competing” against you under those conditions. So you have to have standards. And what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States. [Italics added]

With those last few words, Sanders has effectively written off trade with any country that is not already rich and prosperous—which is simply inhumane.