Poll: Majority of Black Americans Say Free Trade Results in American Job Loss

The majority of black Americans say multinational free trade deals have led to American job loss rather than job creation or lower prices for consumers as promised by the last few decades of the political and economic establishment.

About 60 percent of black Americans said in a recent Harvard-Harris poll that free trade has spurred massive job loss in America, holding the most unfavorable views of free trade of any demographic group in the United States.

An even larger majority of black Americans say that they are personally losing as a result of free trade deals, with about 62 percent saying free trade has hurt their opportunities in the U.S.

Despite massive support for President Trump’s fair trade agenda that takes a skeptical approach to free trade agreements, the Republican establishment and its billionaire donors are largely running their midterm campaigns promoting free trade.

A few anti-establishment, pro-“America First” GOP candidates are running against job-killing free trade deals, though.

Christina Hagan, who is running against the Republican establishment in Ohio’s 16th District, told Breitbart News that it is important that the U.S. renegotiate unfair trade deals — as Trump has said — and hold countries like China accountable for unfairly driving American companies out of business by dumping cheap foreign goods into the country.

Hagan said:

So I think you know, the president wrote a book called “Art of the Deal.” He is absolutely making deals that are to the benefit of American workers, are to the benefit of the American people. I mean the economy in northeast Ohio is robustly dependent on manufacturing and opportunities surrounding that. And so, I think President Trump has done and will continue to do what’s right for the American people as it relates to trade. And when China has been dumping through several decades, unfairly cheating and sending us inferior goods and quality that quite honestly hurts our manufacturing, our products, and our output and our ability to compete, we can’t allow for this to happen to the American workers. The same people that sent President Trump are going to send me to stand with him, to defend our American economy and you know, I support Congressman like Jim Jordan, who have been for free and fair trade. [Emphasis added]

When Trump announced his fair trade tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, American workers from across the country thanked the president in a series of videos in which they detailed how free trade had wiped out their jobs and livelihood.

Since 2001, free trade with China has cost millions of Americans their jobs. For example, in a report by the Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 and 2015, about 3.4 million U.S. jobs, were lost due to the country’s trade deficit with China.

Of the 3.4 million U.S. jobs lost in that time period, about 2.6 million were lost in the crippled manufacturing industry, making up about three-fourths of the loss of jobs from the U.S.-Chinese trade deficit.

The Atlas

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.

The Rust Belt 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

Meanwhile, since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in the 1990s, at least one million net U.S. jobs have been lost because of the free trade deal. Between 2000 and 2014, there have been about five million manufacturing jobs lost across the country as trade deficits continue soaring.

One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being displaced from the steel industry.