The Apartment Hunting Trilemma: Affordable, Spacious, or Convenient? Choosing your priorities when apartment hunting is tough. You can usually only get two out of three: affordability, space, or location. Learn why this classic real estate challenge mirrors larger economic dilemmas
President Trump's economic policy faces a critical trilemma: boosting US manufacturing, restricting immigration, and keeping prices low. While individually achievable, economists argue these goals are mutually exclusive. This economic challenge, impacting American jobs and consumers, forces difficult trade-offs between manufacturing growth, immigration policy, and affordability
Boosting US manufacturing, limiting immigration, and keeping prices low: an impossible economic trifecta? Increasing domestic production requires a workforce, and restricting immigration creates staffing challenges. While tariffs might encourage US manufacturing, they often lead to higher consumer prices. Easing trade policies could lower prices, but this might shift production back overseas. The reality is, achieving all three goals simultaneously presents insurmountable trade-offs
Trump's economic policies: a high-stakes balancing act between manufacturing jobs, immigration, and consumer prices. Can he win the economic war, the culture war, *and* protect American pocketbooks? The trade-offs are real, and the consequences for everyday Americans are significant
President Trump's economic policy prioritizes reshoring American manufacturing, incentivizing domestic production through tariffs on imported goods. While imports remain possible, they face increased costs. However, the administration's approach to businesses actively pursuing domestic manufacturing creates an internal conflict, hindering the president's own objectives
President Trump's push to revitalize US manufacturing faces an economic trilemma: boosting domestic production, restricting immigration, and maintaining low prices. While he encourages foreign investment with the threat of tariffs, challenges like restrictive immigration policies and other factors are making the US a less attractive investment destination, according to Didi Caldwell of Global Location Strategies, a leading site selection firm for manufacturing and industrial companies
Trump's immigration crackdown deters foreign investment in US manufacturing. A recent raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, arresting hundreds of workers, highlights the risks for foreign companies considering relocation. This incident, causing significant delays and sparking broader concerns, exposes the tension between attracting foreign investment, enforcing immigration laws, and controlling manufacturing costs. The threat of unpredictable enforcement actions discourages foreign investment despite the appeal of US manufacturing
Cato Institute's Scott Lincicome highlights the conflict in President Trump's immigration policy: while not entirely opposed to skilled immigration, his highly publicized enforcement actions contradict this stance. This creates an economic trilemma, forcing a choice between boosting US manufacturing, restricting immigration, and maintaining low prices—achieving all three simultaneously proves impossible
High-tech manufacturing in the US (semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries) faces a critical worker shortage. Foreign companies struggle to staff American factories due to a lack of domestically available, highly skilled workers with specialized training in these advanced technologies. Recruiting and training a US workforce from scratch is often impractical, requiring experienced personnel with direct plant operation, design, and commissioning experience
TSMC's Arizona plant highlights a US economic trilemma: boosting domestic manufacturing, restricting immigration, and keeping costs low. Attracting skilled Taiwanese workers is crucial for TSMC's success, but stringent US immigration policies could hinder construction, forcing companies to seek alternative locations or strategies. This underscores the challenge of balancing economic growth with immigration reform and consumer affordability
H-1B Visa Fee Chaos: Trump's $100,000 Surcharge and its Impact on US Tech and Immigration. A recent White House executive order imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications for high-skilled foreign workers created widespread uncertainty. While intended to curb H-1B visa abuse and raise American wages, this policy may inadvertently drive high-value jobs (research & development) overseas to countries like China, India, and Canada, undermining the President's broader economic goals. The initial panic among companies highlights the complex trade-offs between immigration policy, domestic job creation, and economic competitiveness
Trump's immigration policies and their impact on US manufacturing: Restricting legal and undocumented immigration could severely hinder the President's goal of boosting American manufacturing. The current workforce shortage in manufacturing, with over 400,000 unfilled jobs (Bureau of Labor Statistics), is exacerbated by an aging population and a lack of interest among young Americans in these roles. Curbing immigration, therefore, risks undermining job creation and potentially increasing production costs, creating an economic trilemma
UC Davis economics professor Giovanni Peri reveals a critical skills gap: America lacks the workforce to reshore manufacturing. Immigrants, however, possess the vital skills needed to revitalize US manufacturing, highlighting a crucial trade-off in current economic policy
America's economic trilemma: Can we boost manufacturing, curb immigration, and keep prices low? Economists warn that achieving all three simultaneously is impossible. Restricting immigration while simultaneously aiming for manufacturing growth and low inflation creates an insurmountable challenge, hindering economic expansion and job creation for native-born workers. The trade-offs between these competing priorities demand a realistic assessment of economic policy
President Trump's economic policies face a critical trilemma: boosting US manufacturing, restricting immigration, and controlling prices. Economists argue these goals are incompatible. Tariffs, intended to protect American manufacturing, risk increasing prices for both imported and domestically produced goods, potentially negating their intended benefit. This blunt approach, some experts contend, lacks strategic application and may be self-defeating
“The administration’s trade and immigration policies are bad for consumers, full stop, they just are,” says Gordon Hanson, an urban policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “When you tax imports, that’s bad for consumers. When you drive up the price of goods we produce by restricting the supply of labor, that’s bad for consumers.”
Tariffs: A Price Wall Protecting American Manufacturing? While tariffs aim to shield domestic companies by increasing the cost of foreign goods, the reality is more complex. This "price wall" strategy, intended to boost consumer demand for US-made products, can lead to unintended consequences. Increased prices on imported goods often translate to higher prices for domestically produced goods as well. For example, 2018 tariffs on washing machines resulted in price hikes for both imported and US-made machines, impacting related products like dryers. This economic trilemma highlights the trade-offs between protecting domestic manufacturing, controlling immigration, and maintaining affordable consumer prices
“The tariffs will also decrease the variety of products that are available in the United States,” Lovely says. “There’s this impression that this build-up in manufacturing is sort of a free ride, there’s no trade-off, but we’re running this huge experiment where we’re trying to shift the composition of the US economy.”
The tariffs are attempting to shuffle workers away from areas the economy may more urgently need, such as healthcare (someone has to take care of aging baby boomers). There’s only so much you can do to push people toward manufacturing — it’s not a thriving sector, many of the higher-tech plants don’t need that many people, and if you manage to reshore, say, t-shirt factories, those are going to be difficult jobs to fill and cause a big spike in prices.
“If you jack up tariffs high enough, you’ll bring manufacturing production back, but it’s a really costly way of doing it, because you’re taxing consumers to make that happen,” Hanson says.
The administration’s policies are already driving up prices on some goods, including coffee, beef, apparel, and energy. Some companies, such as automakers, have eaten the costs so far, but many economists say that as time goes on, they’ll pass on the pressure in the form of higher prices.
To be sure, it’s not just Trump whose priorities conflict with one another. It’s the American people. While Americans’ concerns about immigration are declining, it’s one of the reasons the president was elected. Polls show voters agree with the idea of bringing back manufacturing, even if they don’t want the jobs themselves. They’re also worried about increased prices. The jumble means the public’s views are misaligned, too.
In a statement to Business Insider, White House spokesperson Kush Desai disputed the premise of a trilemma. “In the two decades after World War II, American industry and working-class living standards blossomed despite relatively low rates of immigration. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan similarly used tariffs over the past few decades to develop their manufacturing bases and massively raise living standards — all without letting tens of millions of unvetted migrants pour over their borders. President Trump’s America First agenda has tamed inflation, sealed our border, and secured trillions in historic investment commitments to lay the groundwork for a resurgence of American Greatness,” he said.
When I ran the statement by Lincicome, from Cato, he told me it read like a “hilarious non sequitur” and said it was like comparing apples to oranges. In the two decades after World War II, the US saw a huge increase in its native-born working-age population, with soldiers coming home, women going to work, and the baby boom, and much of the rest of the world “was in shambles” after the war. Now, we have the opposite. “This is simply not the baby boom,” he said. He added that many economists would “love a streamlined and more open legal immigration process.”
I reached out to Lovely, too, who said via email that the countries the White House named that have used tariffs in the past “were at much lower levels of development than the US at the time of their rapid growth phase (and far from the productivity frontier).” None used tariffs as a major policy instrument, and “it is difficult to see how their growth experiences, in such different contexts (China in particular) make much sense as a model for the American economy today.”
The White House’s specific policies aside, the overall uncertainty emanating from the Oval Office has many businesses on edge. The president is attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve. Under his watch, the US government has taken positions in Intel and US Steel and halted production on a nearly finished offshore wind project. It’s the kind of stuff that makes the rest of the world look at the US and think … hoo boy.
“Companies around the world might be looking at the US and wondering if this is really the environment to invest in at this point in time,” says Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.
In an ideal world, there would be a boom in job growth, in manufacturing and otherwise, that disproportionately benefited American workers. And it would happen while prices stayed low and inflation remained at bay. But that’s not the world we live in. The White House’s approach to trade and immigration risks pushing up prices. Businesses, consumers, and workers are on edge, and it feels impossible to guess what’s next. The harder the president pushes on any one side of his triad of goals, the other two start to give.
“At the end of the day, there are people making these decisions, and there’s been a huge erosion of trust,” Caldwell says. “Generally speaking, people don’t like to do business with those that they don’t trust.”
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
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