With his tousled hair, populist flair, and the blessing of the queen, Boris Johnson moved into 10 Downing Street this week as the United Kingdom’s new prime minister. His ascent, besides providing more colorful images for TV, will bring both Brexit and a future US-UK free trade agreement closer to reality.
Johnson has championed Brexit, the UK’s exit from the European Union that was approved narrowly by British voters in a referendum in June 2016. Johnson has committed his government to leave the EU by the October 31 deadline, even if it means “crashing out” without an agreement with the EU on exit terms.
Putting aside the short-term consequences of a hard Brexit, the UK’s exit from the EU’s customs union will free the UK government to sign its own trade agreements with other nations,

Thank you, Chairwoman Velázquez, Ranking Member Chabot, and members of the committee for the opportunity to talk about the urgent need to reform the US visa system to better serve our nation in the 21st century. I’m a senior research fellow and codirector of the Trade and Immigration Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Mercatus Center is the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
Today, I would like to suggest the following three takeaways:
The H-1B visa program and the high-skilled immigration it facilitates are key to the prosperity of the US economy, including the healthcare sector.
Small businesses as well as large businesses have a stake in a more modern, streamlined, and

Daniel Griswold writes on the reduction in economic uncertainty brought about by the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the replacement for NAFTA.
Read it at The Hill.

Daniel Griswold appears on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss recent policy developments regarding the southern border with Mexico.

Daniel Griswold discusses the positive outcomes of normalized trade with China, and how trade liberalization in general leads to mutual benefits.
Read it at Reason.

Daniel Griswold appeared on CNBC’s The Exchange to discuss President Trump’s threat to close the southern border with Mexico.

President Trump has delivered on his promise to shake up Washington, arguably nowhere more so than in the policy space of international trade. President Trump’s trade agenda has challenged more than seven decades of bipartisan policy commitment to seeking lower trade barriers at home and abroad through negotiated agreements.
While President Trump pays lip service to pursuing free trade and eliminating tariffs, his trade policies so far have been marked by higher U.S. duties on a range of products, from washing machines to steel. Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the administration has imposed duties on $250 billion of imports from China, with those duties set to escalate in 2019 absent an agreement with China. And under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the

Recent suggestions for higher “reciprocal” tariffs on goods entering the United States imported from countries that impose higher tariffs than the United States would be an economic and administrative nightmare—and a policy mistake of historic proportions. So argues Daniel Griswold in “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: The Danger of Imposing ‘Reciprocal’ Tariff Rates.”
The United States presently applies tariffs on a nondiscriminatory “unconditional most-favored nation” (MFN) basis (this is also consistent with our international treaty obligations). The guiding principle of unconditional MFN is equality: another nation’s duty rates are internal matters as long as they are applied equally to similar products from all other nations. This has been the foundation of US trade policy and the

Thank you for the opportunity to offer comments for the January 29, 2018, hearing held by the Office of United States Trade Representative on negotiating objectives for a potential US-UK trade agreement. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is dedicated to bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems and to advancing knowledge about market-based policies that advance the freedom and well-being of the American people.
At a historic meeting at Chequers, England, in July 2018, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May agreed to pursue an ambitious US-UK trade agreement if and when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. For the people of the United States, such an agreement would deepen our commercial ties to a longtime ally and the world’s

Aboard Air Force One on his way back from the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires this weekend, President Trump renewed his threat to withdraw the United States from the almost 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. It’s a threat the president would be wise to reconsider.
President Trump has long been a critic of NAFTA. This fall his administration succeeded in renegotiating the agreement with Canada and Mexico, and last week he signed the re-named “US-Mexico-Canada Agreement” (USMCA) with his counterparts at the beginning of the G-20 meeting.
In an effort to prod Congress to approve the revised agreement, President Trump told reporters, “I will be formally terminating NAFTA shortly. …We (will) get rid of NAFTA. It’s been a disaster for the United States.” When

Daniel Griswold discusses President Trump’s proposed executive order on birthright citizenship with host Larry Mantle.

As we approach the November elections, President Trump has been touting the strong economy as one of his major accomplishments. In a recent speech at a steel plant in Illinois, the president said, “We’re having the best economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country.” 
Just how good is the U.S. economy compared to what the president inherited in January 2017, and how much credit do he and the GOP Congress deserve for it? The answer is mixed: The economy has indeed improved under the president’s watch, but not spectacularly so, and the credit due to Washington is modest…
Continue reading: Trump vs Obama: The Economic Tale of the Tape

Somewhat lost among all the front-page news last week was President Trump’s meeting with the president of South Korea in New York to sign a revised version of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement.
President Trump hailed the changes as representing an entirely new agreement to replace the 2012 pact that he had denounced earlier in his presidency as “a horrible deal” that was destroying America. In fact, according to Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump presidency, Fear, the president was ready in April 2017 to sign a letter withdrawing the United States from the agreement, but aides managed to quietly snatch it from his desk.
The changes the Trump administration negotiated with South Korea are not major and certainly do not represent anything like a new agreement. Nor are the changes a net

Daniel Griswold discusses the Trump administration’s attempts to redefine the term "public charge" and how it might affect legal immigration.

As talks resume with Canada this week over revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), President Trump is threatening to terminate the accord if our northern neighbor refuses to agree to U.S. terms, including the scrapping of its protectionist dairy program. While the almost 25-year-old agreement is due for a tune up, ending it with Canada would be a huge mistake.
Negotiations so far have yielded mixed results. In bilateral talks, the United States and Mexico agreed to add a chapter enhancing digital trade, and for Mexico to raise its “de minimis threshold” exempting small shipments from customs inspections and duties to $100. Other rule changes would protect intellectual property and reduce non-tariff barriers against agricultural trade…
Continue reading: NAFTA Needs a

Trade tensions with China show no sign of resolving themselves. The US administration seems to believe that China has more to lose; after all, American exports to China are far lower than vis-versa. Dan Griswold points out the flaws in this line of thought and urges the restoration of free trade in an opinion for the LA Times. 
Read it here: In a trade war, everyone loses

Daniel Griswold appeared on CNBC’s Closing Bell to discuss Trump’s proposed trade deal with Mexico and Canada.

Senator John McCain was a hero in wartime and he was a hero in defending the freedom of Americans to trade with the rest of the world and to welcome immigrants to the United States.
While he confessed that he was not an expert on economic policy, McCain understood instinctively that embracing more openness to trade and immigration was profoundly in America’s economic and foreign policy interests. He truly put his country first, ahead of special interest deals and tribal politics.
McCain’s voting record during his six terms in the Senate was strongly pro-trade (see the Cato Institute’s compilation of congressional trade votes). He voted in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Uruguay Round Agreements Act that established the World Trade Organization, permanent normal trade

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik is one of the more heterodox voices in today’s debate on trade and globalization. He’s not a Trumpian protectionist, nor is he a Milton-Friedman-style “globalist” (like me) who advocates unabashedly for free trade and free markets.
Rodrik appears often on op-ed pages and has garnered more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. In his much discussed book from 1997, “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?” and his latest, “Straight Talk on Trade,” he’s carved his niche as someone who is not opposed outright to globalization, but who thinks it has been allowed to run amok, inviting the kind of backlash from the right and the left that we are seeing today. As Vox put it recently, Rodrik warned us “that tensions around global trade would lead to greater divisions between the

After the release of the monthly employment and trade reports, Daniel Griswold took some time to sift through the highlights. What effects are the tariffs having? Are manufacturing jobs returning? To learn the answers to these questions and more, read the post at Mad About Trade.
Read it here: A few observations from today’s employment and trade reports

At a meeting last week in Peosta, Iowa to tout his trade agenda, President Trump took special aim at Canada. “The Canadians—you have a totally closed market … they have a 375 percent tax on dairy products, other than that it’s wonderful to deal. And we have a very big deficit with Canada—trade deficit.”
The president’s remarks may have been mere bluster designed to get Canada to cut a deal on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but they were detached from reality and they bode ill for a favorable outcome from the administration’s current showdown with our major trading partners.
Far from being “totally closed,” Canada’s market is almost totally open to US exports. Thanks to NAFTA, 100 percent of US non-agricultural exports enter Canada duty free, including manufacturing

In his whirlwind visit to Europe, President Trump first told The Sun newspaper that British Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise on Brexit “killed” the possibility of the U.S.-U.K. free trade agreement. Then, when he stood next to the prime minister the next day, he said, “a great bilateral trade agreement” was possible after all.
If the United Kingdom does exit the European Union under the softer terms set out in the U.K. government’s white paper last week, a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States would not only be possible but a positive step forward for the two nations and their “special relationship…
Continue reading: US-UK free trade agreement would only deepen the ‘special relationship’
Photo credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock

Daniel Griswold appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss the Trump administration’s trade disputes with Canada, China, Mexico, and the EU.

Daniel Griswold discusses the impact of a trade war with host Drew Mariani.

This morning’s Commerce Department trade report for May contains only the slightest hint that the world is about to see its first real trade war in decades. U.S. imports and exports are near record highs, but if you look closely enough at some specific product categories and duty collections, there are growing signs that trouble is brewing.
If we look at broad trade flows, there is nothing through May that would indicate that trade policy has changed in any meaningful way under President Trump. Total U.S. exports of goods and services continued their upward trend in May, reaching a record high $215.3 billion. Total U.S. imports reached $258.4 billion, the second highest monthly total ever. The trade deficit for goods and services in May was $43.1 billion, down from earlier in the year but

Motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson has drawn fire from President Trump for its decision to move production offshore to escape retaliatory tariffs from the European Union. The episode exposes a new level of vulnerability for the US economy in the escalating trade wars that the president promised would be easy to win.
In President Trump’s view, the United States is bound to win a trade war because we import $800 billion more in goods each year than we export, and thus we have a lot more targets to shoot at with our tariffs. This approach assumes that US tariffs only hurt foreign producers, but in reality they inflict just as much (if not more) economic pain on Americans. US import tariffs are a direct tax on American consumers and producers—with Harley-Davidson being one of the many victims of

In an ongoing effort to justify its escalating trade war with China, the White House issued a report today cataloging all the ways the Chinese government is waging “economic aggression” against the United States.
The one-sided polemic comes from the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, run by Peter Navarro. It takes some basic facts about Chinese economic policy and contorts them into a direct threat to our national interest and way of life. As the report states in the opening paragraph:
“The People’s Republic of China (China) has experienced rapid economic growth to become the world’s second largest economy while modernizing its industrial base and moving up the global value chain. However, much of this growth has been achieved in significant part through aggressive acts,

As the Trump administration imposes tariffs on imported steel, and threatens further tariffs on goods from China and on imported cars, Congress has been a curious bystander.
Curious because the power to regulate international trade, according to the US Constitution, resides solely with Congress, not the executive branch. Article 1, Section 8 states plainly that, “Congress shall have Power …To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Article II on the executive branch gives no such power to the president.
The Trump administration imposed the tariffs on imported steel under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 that authorizes the president to block imports that are deemed to threaten national security. Congress passed Section 232 believing it would be seldom used and then only in

President Trump is rattling his tariff sabre again, this time threatening to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported cars in the name of national security.
The move may be largely a bluff to get Mexico and Canada to bend to the administration’s demands on a renegotiated NAFTA, but if actually implemented the car tariffs would cause serious damage to the welfare of American families, the US economy, and even the domestic US auto industry the tariffs would supposedly benefit. And it would needlessly aggravate relations with many of our closest allies.
President Trump’s threat should be taken seriously. He has instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to investigate the impact of imports on the US auto industry under a US trade law known as Section 232, which allows a US president to slap

America’s historical openness to immigration has enriched its culture, expanded economic opportunity, and enhanced its influence in the world. Immigrants complement native-born workers and raise general productivity through innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants continue to integrate successfully into American society.
America is a nation of immigrants. That is not a cliché but a simple fact. Almost all Americans today either immigrated themselves or descended from immigrants, whether from England and Germany in the colonial era, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or Latin America and Asia in more recent decades. Today one out of every four people residing in the United States are either first- or second-generation immigrants. Immigration