The impact of Trump’s impending tariffs

PHOTO BY MARLEE CARD
Dimitri Baptiste, assistant manager of Mail Services, helps load students’ packages to transport on campus.

President Donald Trump signed three trade-related executive orders on Feb. 1. Two of the orders imposed 25% tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada and 10% tariffs on goods imported from China and energy imported from Canada. The tariffs on Mexico and Canada were paused on Feb. 3, but the Chinese tariff went into effect the following day.

A White House fact sheet published on Feb. 1 describes president Trump’s actions as leveraging America’s economic position to secure our U.S. borders and combat fentanyl.

Albert Williams, associate professor in the H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, can see the strategy in the president’s actions.

“[The Trump administration] thinks that fentanyl and [illegal] immigration are national security concerns, and therefore he’s saying he’s going to put these tariffs on you if you don’t take care of the needs that he has for national security,” Williams said. “The overarching goal of the president is to deal with illegal immigration and with the drug issue.”
Williams said that tariffs are typically meant to protect a local industry from being undercut by foreign competitors. Trump’s tariff-based method of bargaining strays from this norm and could prove costly if a deal isn’t struck.

“We’ve gone through a period of free trade with minimal tariffs, and we enjoy all these global goods, so if you put tariffs on these things, you may get less of the goods,” Williams said. “Most economists recognize that when there’s a tariff, prices go up.”

Belay Seyoum, an international business professor in the H. Wayne Huizenga College, believes the volume of trade between friendly nations like Mexico and Canada heightens the stakes of these tariffs.

“We trade with Mexico close to a billion dollars a day. And almost the same also with Canada,” Seyoum said. “If you look at the whole of the West European countries, [and] you put all those together, it’s not equal to the trade between Canada and the United States.”

The larger perspective of the tariff negotiations is hard to track because the situation is constantly changing, but the small-scale impact is very clear. Any possible tariffs will impact the average American heavily.

“We won’t know [the outcome] because these negotiations are very hard to predict,” Williams said. “People who [will feel] the impacts the most are people with lower incomes because they already are living on a shoestring budget and living paycheck to paycheck.”