Republican delegates approved a Trump-backed party platform on Monday that endorses “baseline tariffs” on imports and more stringent trade relations with China in the name of protecting U.S. farmers, workers, and industries from unfair trade. The 16-page document also called for “the largest deportation operation in American history,” aimed at undocumented immigrants.
Former president Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested a baseline tariff of 10 percent on all imported goods, with duties as high as 60 percent on Chinese products. The platform, adopted on an 84-18 vote, said Congress should pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, which would allow the president broad authority to impose tit-for-tat tariffs when a country imposes higher tariffs on a U.S. product than the United States levies on the same product from that country.
Second on the platform’s list of “20 promises that we will accomplish very quickly” was “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” The one-page section on immigration said the GOP would complete the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, station thousands of U.S. troops along the border, and begin massive deportations. “The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens back home and removing those that have violated our laws.”
U.S. food and ag exports to China, our No. 1 customer, plunged by 53 percent, to $10.1 billion, during the Sino-U.S. trade war started by Trump in 2018. Overall, food and ag exports contracted by 4.5 percent, to $139.7 billion in fiscal year 2020, when the nations agreed to a truce. The Trump administration provided $23 billion in trade-war relief to producers. Sales to China rebounded quickly but Brazil is making inroads as a supplier. Mexico and Canada were forecast to push China into third place as a customer this year.
Half of U.S. farmworkers are believed to be undocumented. Legislation in Congress to grant them legal status if they remain in agriculture has foundered in recent years. Attention has shifted to the modernization of the H-2A guest worker visa, now limited to seasonal work, to allow year-round employment on farms and in processing plants. Labor “is the biggest limiting factor that American agriculture has,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, in January.
“Republicans will revoke China’s most-favored nation status, phase out imports of essential goods, and stop China from buying American real estate and industries,” said the seven-paragraph chapter titled, “Protect American workers and farmers from unfair trade.”
“As tariffs on foreign producers go up, taxes on American workers, families, and businesses can come down,” said the trade chapter. Like other sections of the platform, it provided few details. “We commit to re-balancing trade, securing strategic independence, and revitalizing manufacturing.”
As president, Trump preferred one-on-one negotiations with other nations, calculating that U.S. economic power as the world’s largest economy would force trading partners to yield. “Trade wars are good and easy to win,” he said on social media in early 2018. But bilateral negotiations moved slowly and Trump’s greatest trade accomplishment was the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.
Think tanks such as the Peterson Institute for International Economics say Trump’s plan for large-scale import tariffs would invite retaliation by other nations. “The tariffs would reduce after-tax incomes by 3.5 percent for those in the bottom half of the income distribution and cost a typical household in the middle of the income distribution about $1,700 in increased taxes each year,” said the institute in May.
To read the Republican platform, click here.