The first time I set foot in Hickory, a small city at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, the area’s beauty hid its sorrow. Forests rich in oak, maple and pine have given birth to dozens of furniture companies that employ thousands of workers. Hickory’s factories craft the kind of heavy, solid American furniture that is meant to last generations. But everything changed in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization. The surge in Chinese imports devastated Hickory and other small factory towns like it.
President Trump has held up these towns as a symbol of all that’s gone wrong with the American economy. His attacks on globalization and on China, in particular, resonate with voters and power his “America first” agenda. The president has sought to restore American manufacturing by imposing sky-high tariffs and empowering an aggressive deportation force. But if you spend any time in Hickory, you can see how counterproductive these policies are.
The town is making a comeback. The jobs are returning, and incomes are rising. But the reasons have nothing to do with Mr. Trump and his signature policies.
In my early visits to Hickory, in 2016 and 2019, the pain from Chinese competition was evident. Workers recounted enduring layoff after layoff. Taking a drive, they would point to the shuttered buildings and abandoned lots where they had once worked. The owners of the furniture factories sheepishly admitted how naïve they were to think they could make more money by producing goods in China and importing them. Too late, they realized they had turned their Chinese suppliers into competitors who sold to U.S. retailers at prices they couldn’t match.
Hickory’s economic woes began in 2001 when U.S. manufacturers shifted production to low-wage Chinese factories. Between that moment and 2012, Chinese imports nearly tripled as a percentage of America’s economic output, which translated into a loss of about 2.4 million jobs. The import wave swept across the country but crashed hardest into smaller cities in the Southeast and Midwest that depended on one or two industries and had relatively few college-educated residents.
The town of Olney in Illinois was a major U.S. bicycle manufacturing hub before Chinese competition forced the maker of Roadmaster bicycles and other bicycle manufacturers there to shutter. West Plains, Mo., saw its shoemakers shut operations. Grand Rapids, Mich., home to many commercial furniture makers, just lost Howard Miller Co. in nearby Zeeland, while Steelcase Inc., which had invested heavily in China, laid off workers in its wooden furniture business, as did other furniture makers in the state. Some bigger cities weren’t spared either. Providence, R.I., lost most of its costume jewelry industry, and San Jose, Calif., lost electronics manufacturing jobs. Those cities bounced back more quickly because they had diversified economies and major universities that spawned new industries.
Warren Wood, the city manager of Hickory, estimates that the metro area, population 373,000, shed about 45,000 jobs between 2001 and 2013 as the furniture, textile and hosiery industries were clobbered. Unemployment, which had been lower than the national rate before 2001, climbed much higher afterward, hitting 15.4 percent in 2009 when demand for consumer goods collapsed during the recession. Hickory became a poster child for what was termed “the China shock” by three economists — David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gordon Hanson of Harvard and David Dorn of the University of Zurich — who identified the phenomenon and continue to study its impacts.
In China-shocked factory towns, younger workers left in search of opportunities elsewhere while older workers remained after being laid off. They scraped together lower-paying service jobs to make ends meet while waiting to be called back by local manufacturers. Many applied for disability. In Hickory, the number of disability recipients soared by roughly 30 percent between 2001 and 2012, and drug overdose deaths rose. With an aging work force, factory floors lost the tribal knowledge that was once passed from generation to generation of workers.
The trio of economists found that the voters in areas that were deeply affected by Chinese competition and had large white majorities were more extreme: They tended to vote for a Republican candidate further on the right than a more moderate candidate. Counties in the Hickory region voted heavily for Mr. Trump, handing him an identical 72 percent of the vote in each of the past three presidential elections.
The economists also offer an alternative history: If the United States had restricted Chinese imports so they had grown at half the rate they did — a still rapid increase — that would have given communities time to adapt to the changes and retrain workers for new jobs. In that case, they argue, the shift to the right would have been muted enough that Mr. Trump might have lost the 2016 election.
These days, Hickory is changing again. When I visited in December the mood was more optimistic. Factory employment had stabilized, although at a much lower level. The fruits of a $40 million bond issue were evident. Downtown was spruced up; young families walked along new hiking trails. A major university, Appalachian State, opened a Hickory campus in 2023 and was offering scholarships to local students. Young professionals who worked an hour away in Charlotte were beginning to buy homes in the less expensive Hickory region.
But there hasn’t been a manufacturing revival of the kind President Trump promised. Far from it. During his first term, Mr. Trump fought a two-year trade war with China. This led to everyday goods getting slightly more expensive and to many U.S. importers turning toward other countries to avoid tariffs, especially Vietnam. Manufacturing employment in the United States continued its long decline, as did employment in Hickory furniture factories.
While the trade war garnered headlines, a kind of natural evolution was quietly occurring in many of these cities. Factory workers stayed put, grew older and retired. The Social Security, Medicare and other government benefits they collected boosted local spending and goosed demand for health care, transportation and other service businesses that cater to the elderly.
In recent years, Mr. Autor and his colleagues calculate that the job growth in areas hurt by Chinese competition has outpaced growth in areas less affected. This growth can be attributed mostly to the sharp rise in service industry employment. “The employment recovery instead stems almost entirely from young adults and foreign-born immigrants taking their first U.S. jobs” in the regions, they write.
Since 2017, median household income in the hardest-hit regions has grown faster than the national average, Moody’s calculates, after years of lagging behind. The rate of people moving in to these regions has also increased.
In Hickory, economic weaknesses turned into strengths. Decades-old furniture factories were demolished to recover the valuable hardwood used in the ceilings and floors. Laid-off textile workers, skilled at producing cotton fibers, were scooped up by makers of the glass fibers used to connect the internet economy. Fiber optics is now one of the area’s largest manufacturing employers.
The extensive water and sewer systems required for the textile and furniture industries helped persuade Apple, Microsoft and Google to build thirsty data centers in the area, adding a total of about 500 jobs, often at salaries above the area’s per capita income of $34,000. Scott Millar, the president of the Economic Development Corporation of Catawba County, which includes Hickory, is wooing pharmaceutical manufacturers that also need ample water.
Looking to keep or lure back younger residents, Hickory has spent more than $40 million over the past five years renovating downtown and building 10 miles of walking trails along the nearby Catawba River. Craft breweries, coffee shops and townhouses for young families have sprung up. There is some evidence it’s working. After falling for nearly 20 years, the number of people ages 18 to 39 has been rising in the Hickory area since 2017. Mary Furtado, Hickory’s county manager, talks of a “tenuous recovery.”
While manufacturing jobs haven’t expanded, they have stabilized somewhat. But past decades of layoffs and plant closings have convinced many local families that factory work has no future. At a 2023 job fair at the local community college, some parents made sure their kids didn’t stop to chat at the furniture company booths. “You could read their lips,” telling their children to look elsewhere, says Amy Guyer, the vice president of human resources at a furniture manufacturer.
Instead, local employers are turning more frequently to newcomers to the area. Since 1980, the percentage of foreign born in the Hickory area has increased more than tenfold, with most of them from Latin America. Hispanics now make up 10 percent of the region’s population, and are the fastest growing minority group — quite a change for an area whose Walmart didn’t stock tortillas in the 1990s.
The biggest economic change in the region, though, has been the surge of hiring in service industries, especially health care. In 2003, there were about twice as many people working in furniture manufacturing as in health care. These days, employment in hospitals, urgent care facilities, nursing homes and other health care facilities outnumbers furniture employment by nearly 30 percent. Looking to meet the growing demand, Catawba Valley Community College doubled the number of students in its health care programs during the past decade to 400. About 150 applicants compete for 40 daytime nursing slots.
Maria Rios is a 39-year-old Mexican immigrant whose parents traveled first to California and then to the Hickory area around 1999 when they heard about the booming furniture business — a path taken by many Mexican immigrants of their generation. Watching her parents get up at 4:30 a.m. to go to work in buildings that were frigid in the winter and sweltering in the summer turned Ms. Rios off factory work, as did the frequent cutbacks in available shifts.
Instead, she waitressed at IHOP and got her certified nursing assistant certificate at C.V.C.C. While her husband still works as an upholsterer, she works at Trinity Village, an elder care facility in Hickory. Trinity has been so stretched for skilled help that two years ago it started its own certified nursing assistant program and has searched for additional hires in Puerto Rico, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
The manufacturing-to-health-care path was also followed by Nicole Bivens, who worked for six years drilling, cutting and laminating wood for a cabinet company. Furniture work was dangerous work, she said, and the conditions were terrible. “The only warm place during the winter was the laminator,” she said. “That would get to be 200 degrees, but it was unbearable during the summer.”
Ms. Bivens had once wanted to be a librarian, but now she said she had found her calling in documentation. She works as a health information management specialist, organizing medical records for the elderly. The work pays better than factory work, but more important, she finds it rewarding. “My job is keeping patients and their information safe,” she said.
She will do better financially than most of Hickory’s new hires in health care. Nationally, the China-shock economists found, the service jobs that replaced factory ones pay less, and that’s generally true in Hickory, where production jobs pay an average of $22.15, compared with $17.60 for health care support. But that beats the decline of the prior two decades. “You get a jobs recovery, not a good jobs recovery,” said Mr. Hanson, the Harvard economist.
Rather than strengthen the recovery and help lift incomes, President Trump’s policies in his second administration might well reverse it. He has tagged upholstered furniture imports with a 25 percent tariff, no matter where they are produced. That has had some positive effects. Several foreign furniture suppliers are considering opening a plant in Hickory.
But for Alex Shuford III, the 53-year-old chief executive of RHF Investments, which owns Century Furniture, the downsides of tariffs far outweigh any positives. Mr. Shuford is the scion of a wealthy furniture and textile family that reaches back to Abel Alexander Shuford, a Civil War veteran who founded Shuford Mills in 1880. It was up to Alex Shuford and his father to figure out how to respond to the challenge and opportunity represented by China’s manufacturing prowess.
Initially, Century joined other furniture makers and imported goods from China, figuring the low labor cost would mean fatter profits on less expensive furniture. But by showing Chinese companies how to produce for American consumers, the U.S. firms unwittingly created their toughest competitors. “It was like Ford helping Toyota to understand American tastes,” he once said.
Earlier than most furniture makers, Mr. Shuford realized that competing directly with China in furniture was a losing game. He shifted Century’s focus to customized, higher-end upholstered goods, which gave his North Carolina plants an edge. Chinese manufacturers have had a tougher time matching smaller production runs of sofas and chairs made from more than 1,000 different fabrics. Still, he said, it’s a low-margin business where a profit of 5 percent before interest and taxes is considered a good year.
Mr. Shuford complains that his company’s tariff bill is more than 10 times what it was before Mr. Trump took office, and the president’s on-again, off-again tariff decisions chew up hundreds of hours of executive time calculating how much to increase prices. Century’s customers who can afford $7,000 sofas probably won’t be too frightened by the tariff’s higher prices. But the company worries that price increases on less expensive furniture, the mainstay of furniture stores, could undermine the retailers who also sell Century and RHF’s other brands. “Whatever advantage we get from protection doesn’t matter if the ecosystem goes away,” said Brandon Hucks, RHF’s chief financial officer.
RHF and other companies in manufacturing and services also fear that Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown will scare away the legal immigrant labor they now depend upon for growth. Already, RHF has gone to extraordinary lengths to attract such workers. It spent more than $2 million to buy a local leather chair manufacturer mainly for its 85 or so employees. The manager for one of RHF’s plants, Hector Ladero Rivas, is a former professional soccer player from Spain who sometimes recruits employees at local soccer matches.
In late November, Border Patrol agents made the rounds in the Hickory area looking for undocumented immigrants. Around the same time, a Nicaraguan furniture worker was detained in Charlotte when he showed up for an immigration appointment and was later deported.
Hispanic coffee shops, bakeries and restaurants in the Hickory area closed. Even Hispanics who are citizens say they now carry their passports out of fear they could be nabbed. Some stayed home rather than risk driving to work or going to school. Centro Latino, a human services group, canceled English language classes and started delivering food from their pantries rather than asking clients to travel to their facility. “We need to grow our work force,” said Mr. Wood, the city manager. “If part of the work force leaves, we can’t get ahead.”
Mr. Trump, who carried North Carolina by about three percentage points in the last election, won’t be on the ballot in the 2026 midterm elections or the 2028 presidential one — presumably.
Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University who has written extensively on the politics of Appalachia and the South, sees an opportunity for Democrats who have struggled there in presidential elections. “The ticket to Democratic success isn’t winning rural America,” he said. “It’s reducing the bleeding.”
If the Democrats can do marginally better in towns like Hickory, they can secure victory by running up big margins in blue cities like Charlotte. The demographic and economic changes in China-shocked areas give Democrats a shot to do just that in North Carolina and other swing states with similar dynamics.
In Hickory, the shift in the mood is not hard to find. Ginny Romero, the influential executive director of Centro Latino, told me that she is so fed up with the Trump crackdown that she is ready to endorse candidates, on her own, who oppose the administration’s policies: “I have never seen youths so ready to vote, and not just youths — every age group, every generation.”
Bob Davis has long covered U.S.-China economic relations and is the co-author of “Superpower Showdown,” a history of the first Trump administration’s trade war with China.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Town That Reveals All of Trump’s Bad Economic Ideas
