The vast majority of Americans support President Trump’s economic nationalist agenda on foreign trade, wherein the populist president is in the process of renegotiating multinational trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
As Trump signed into law his 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum to protect American workers and U.S. industries, more than 80 percent of Americans say they support the president’s trade economic nationalism.
In a Harvard-Harris poll, about 83 percent of Americans said they supported Trump’s effort to level the playing field on foreign trade to reverse the decades-long pattern of multinational free trade agreements which have wiped out broad portions of the Rust Belt and middle America.
Trump’s trade economic nationalism is even more popular with Republican voters, a voting bloc that is misinterpreted as staunch proponents of endless free trade by the GOP establishment and corporate interests.
About 93 percent of Republican voters say they strongly or somewhat support Trump’s plans to renegotiate free trade to benefit American workers and to prevent multinational corporations from easily moving U.S. jobs overseas.
Free trade, like immigration, is an issue that has come at the expense of American workers. With free trade, foreign markets have been readily opened to multinational corporations, allowing them to offshore American jobs while easily exporting their products back into the U.S.
With immigration, the U.S. continues to import more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants every year, resulting in decades of poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
The Rust Belt, which Trump swept in the 2016 presidential election, has been one of the hardest regions hit because of U.S. free trade with Mexico. In total, about 700,000 U.S. have been displaced, including:
- 14,500 American workers displaced in Wisconsin
- 43,600 American workers displaced in Michigan
- 2,600 American workers displaced in West Virginia
- 26,300 American workers displaced in Pennsylvania
- 34,900 American workers displaced in Ohio
- 34,300 American workers displaced in New York
- 6,500 American workers displaced in Iowa
- 24,400 American workers displaced in Indiana
- 34,700 American workers displaced in Illinois
Like trade, Trump’s pro-American immigration agenda is largely supported by Americans. As Breitbart News most recently reported, reducing legal immigration levels to raise the wages of Americans is the second biggest priority for Republican voters.
Likewise, black Americans and Hispanics are by a majority supportive of Trump’s effort to allow a small group of illegal aliens to remain in the U.S. in exchange for cutting legal immigration levels down to about 500,000 to 750,000 admissions a year.
More Americans support zero immigration to the U.S. than they do current legal immigration levels, as Breitbart News reported.
The Washington-imposed cheap labor economic model of endless free trade and importing millions of foreign workers to compete with working and middle-class Americans for U.S. jobs has helped keep U.S. wages stagnant for decades.
Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, 15 years and older, 1960 to 2016.
Meanwhile, Trump’s economic nationalist model has already resulted in history-making wage growth for American workers in the construction industry, the garment industry, for workers employed at small businesses, and black Americans.
The historic wages have been secured by increased enforcement of immigration across the U.S., where deportations of illegal aliens living in the interior of the country increased nearly 40 percent in Fiscal Year 2017.
The economic nationalist model is expected to result in continuous higher wages for America’s working and middle class for the next two years, Emerson Electric CEO David Farr admitted last week, as Breitbart News reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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