The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. New Preface and Epilogue with Updates on Economic Issues and Main Characters, 2nd Edition

9Returning to America

Chinese T-Shirts Versus American Jobs

The shipping container stacked with T-shirts boards the freighter in Shang-hai and heads back across the Pacific.¹ The ship travels south along the western coast of Mexico and squeezes through the Panama Canal before heading north to the Miami port, and finally to the screen-printing factory at Sherry Manufacturing. At this point, the T-shirts enter the most complex and challenging phase of their lives: trying to gain access to the U.S. market. Chinese T-shirts and Chinese immigrants have similar experiences in attempting to get to America. In both cases, the journey is expensive, risky, and often illegal. There is an army waiting on shore, ready to fight the invasion. The U.S. apparel industry has lost the race to the bottom, and while this may be the result of a ‘‘happy concurrence of causes,’’ as David Hume suggested in 1748, not everybody is happy about it. Most of the American South has moved onward and upward from textile production, but there are pockets across the Carolinas and Georgia where the mills are still at the center of the economy and the community. Losers in the U.S. textile and apparel industries are not going gracefully, especially not when losing to China. The textile and apparel trade is the most managed and protected manufacturing trade in U.S. history, or, as one writer noted, ‘‘the most spectacular and comprehensive protectionist regime in existence.’'² Whether the regime has at the same time ...