Fact Check: Yes, American Jobs Have Left the U.S. — with Biden’s Support

CLAIM: During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday evening, he claimed that for decades, American jobs have been “exported” from the United States economy.

VERDICT: True. American jobs, for decades, have been eliminated from the U.S. economy with Biden’s backing.

“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs,” Biden said during his third SOTU address to the nation.

The claim is true. From 2001 to 2018, U.S. free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.

The massive gutting of working and middle class American jobs came as Biden, then in the Senate, supported China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO). In September 2020, Biden defended his supporting China’s entering the WTO and normalizing trade relations with China.

Likewise, Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), claiming in 1997 that the free trade deal would help American workers in the auto industry. Those workers, years later, had their jobs outsourced to Mexico.

As a result of NAFTA, nearly a million American jobs have been certified by the federal government as being lost directly due to the free trade deal, according to data gathered by Public Citizen. These are only the jobs that the Trade Adjustment Assistance program recognizes as being lost to free trade and does not indicate the actual number of jobs lost.

Free trade with Mexico, alone, has eliminated at least 700,000 American jobs, and states in the Rust Belt have been hit the hardest.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.