Let’s consider how such a policy would be enforced in practice.
When an American company “moves jobs to Mexico,” it doesn’t disassemble a factory and load all of the parts onto border-crossing trucks. That might be relatively easy to stop. Instead, the company closes or limits some U.S. production while expanding or initiating new production south of the border. Given that reality, how is government supposed to respond?
Using the law to forbid factory closures would have serious negative consequences. For one thing, those factories may be losing money and end up going bankrupt. For another, stopping the closure of old plants would lock the U.S. into earlier technologies and modes of production, limiting progress and economic advancement.
An alternative policy would prohibit companies from cutting American production and expanding in Mexico within, say, a two-year window. But would that be effective? If a law is needed, it presumably means that Mexican production is more profitable, at the margin, than U.S. production. So if American companies couldn’t shift production to Mexico, Mexican companies could expand production on their own. Or perhaps Mexico would look to non-American multinationals. The end result would be that Asian, European and Mexican investors would gain at the expense of U.S. companies.
American investors could also work around the law. If regulations prevented, say, Ford Motor Company from transferring its own capital funds to Mexico, what would keep it from using affiliates, subsidiaries, commercial alliances, or a complex web of foreign transfers to achieve more or less the same ends? The initial restrictions might prove as porous as the U.S. corporate income tax system.
Furthermore, if we limit the export of American capital to Mexico, the biggest winner would be China, as one of its most significant low-wage competitors -- Mexico -- suddenly would be hobbled.
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The biggest irony of this whole Trump initiative is that it likely would lead to higher U.S. trade deficits. Economists stress the offsetting nature of trade flows and capital flows. As the accounting identities are constructed, a higher trade deficit corresponds to higher capital inflows, and a lower trade deficit corresponds to higher capital outflows. (To see the nature of these balanced transactions, imagine China selling goods and accumulating Treasury bills in return, a form of investment in this country.) So a Trumpian plan to limit capital outflows, through whatever means, is also -- if only indirectly and without such intent -- a plan to boost the trade deficit.
How’s that for making America great again? The laws of economics and politics have not yet been repealed.
