The three-headed problem that’s throwing the US economy into chaos

There’s a rule of thumb in apartment hunting: People want something affordable, spacious, and convenient, but in the end, they can only get two of the three. Big and cheap? Prepare for a long commute. Less expensive and downtown? Enjoy your shoebox. Spacious and well-located? Get ready to shell out big bucks. It’s a classic “trilemma,” or an impossible triangle: No matter how you, well, triangulate it, one priority has to go if the other two remain.

President Donald Trump — and the American people along with him — are in the midst of an economic trilemma that is much more serious than deciding whether you should live in the center of town or way out in the suburbs. The president wants to boost US manufacturing, cut down on immigration, and keep prices down all at once. Those work fine as goals on their own, or even in pairs, but many economists and trade experts say he can’t accomplish all three at once.

Sure, you can try to open more factories to build cheap stuff or even expensive, high-tech goods, but cutting off the flow of workers from abroad makes staffing those factories challenging. You may be able to severely curb immigration and make your best efforts at building in the US via tariffs, but that will likely push prices up. Companies could continue to produce less expensive products abroad, especially if trade policy were eased, which would keep consumers happy. The problem is that there are always tradeoffs.

It’s Trump’s economic war vs. his culture war vs. the pocketbooks of everyday Americans.

If there has been one throughline to the president’s economic agenda, it’s his desire to rebuild American manufacturing and get companies to make things here. Firms can still import to the US, but they’ll have to pay a price to do so, in the form of tariffs. But the way the administration is treating some businesses that are making efforts to do what Trump wants is getting in the president’s own way.

“He’s asking for these countries to invest in the United States, oftentimes holding the threat of tariffs over their head in order to encourage them to invest in the United States. But at the same time, there’s a series of things that are happening that are making the US a less attractive place to invest,” says Didi Caldwell, the founder and owner of Global Location Strategies, a firm that specializes in site selection for manufacturing and industrial companies.

It’s Trump’s economic war vs. his culture war vs. the pocketbooks of everyday Americans.

The most glaring deterrent for foreign companies looking to move some operations to America’s shores is Trump’s immigration crackdown. In early September, federal law enforcement conducted an immigration raid on a $7.6 billion Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia, arresting and detaining 475 workers, most of whom were South Korean nationals. The company said the raid would delay the plant’s startup date by two to three months, in the immediate term, but the incident has sparked broader concerns about foreign investment. It’s true that foreign companies building and investing in the US should follow the law on immigration and otherwise. It’s also true that the threat of showy, seemingly random crackdowns has spooked them.

“There’s this gray area, and generally folks look the other way, but you don’t look the other way when you’re conducting very public immigration raids,” says Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “That gets to where the conflict is. Trump is weird. He actually is not totally against at least skilled immigrants, but he also wants this very public display of force.”

Foreign companies in high-tech fields such as semiconductors, electric vehicles, and batteries often say they need to bring in foreign, high-skilled workers trained on the exact technology to get their American factories up and running. “It’s not as if we can train people in the US, or we can pull people from other parts of the US to be able to do that,” Caldwell says. “You have to have been there and operated those plants and possibly designed them and commissioned them.”

Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC has brought over Taiwanese nationals to build and staff its plant in Arizona. If the US tells these companies they can’t do that or makes navigating immigration too hard, they may decide not to build or find a workaround.

Even more recently, the White House sparked immigration chaos when the president signed an executive order attaching a $100,000 fee to H-1B visas, temporary visas that are meant for high-skilled foreign workers. Initially, many companies panicked, telling their foreign workers to rush back to the US if they were abroad; the administration later clarified the fee would only apply to new applications. The White House said the order is a way to prevent abuse of the H-1B visa system and raise wages for American workers, but it could undercut the president’s other goals. There’s evidence that limits on H-1B visas that limits on H-1B visas push companies to move more of their high-value roles, like research and development, abroad, particularly to China, India, and Canada.

Beyond the issues caused by restrictions on legal, skilled immigration, the Trump administration’s approach to undocumented immigrants could ultimately be detrimental, too. Many of the new manufacturing and construction jobs the president envisions creating are types that, as of now, employ a large number of immigrants, and suddenly restricting the supply of workers could do more harm than good. In the long run, it would be difficult to fill those roles with people born in the US. For one thing, the aging US population means there are fewer people with the physical ability to do those jobs, and younger American workers aren’t lining up to get jobs in manufacturing, either: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 400,000 jobs in the sector are unfilled, and many surveys show that few people are ready to jump onto the factory floor.

Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, who focuses on immigration and labor, says the types of skills needed to bring manufacturing back to the US are in short supply among the current American-born population. Instead, immigrants have been providing the necessary skills and services.

The issue isn’t just prices and inflation — it’s the overall health of the economy and growth. “Even if you take away the cheap stuff part, if you want an economy that grows, including in manufacturing, shrinking the employment of immigrants at a time in which the native employment is shrinking, you are not going to get these two things together,” Peri says.

The president’s immigration approach aside, his trade policy and price goals are, in many ways, incompatible, some economists say. Slapping tariffs on imports not only risks increasing the price of goods made abroad but is also likely to drive up the price of products made in America. And many economists say they’re not being applied strategically but as a blunt tool that may be undercutting itself.

“The administration’s trade and immigration policies are bad for consumers, full stop, they just are,” says Gordon Hanson, an urban policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “When you tax imports, that’s bad for consumers. When you drive up the price of goods we produce by restricting the supply of labor, that’s bad for consumers.”

If you jack up tariffs high enough, you’ll bring manufacturing production back, but it’s a really costly way of doing it.

The idea of the tariffs is to offer protection for companies that make things in America by making foreign-made goods more expensive. The goal is to create a “price wall,” where high prices compel consumers to eschew things made abroad, says Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who focuses on tariffs and trade. But increased prices on foreign goods give domestic companies cover to raise their prices. The effects of the tariffs can spread across goods that aren’t directly targeted. In 2018, for example, when Trump imposed tariffs on washing machines, they got more expensive, even ones made in the US. So did dryers, even though they weren’t subject to import taxes.

“The tariffs will also decrease the variety of products that are available in the United States,” Lovely says. “There’s this impression that this build-up in manufacturing is sort of a free ride, there’s no trade-off, but we’re running this huge experiment where we’re trying to shift the composition of the US economy.”

The tariffs are attempting to shuffle workers away from areas the economy may more urgently need, such as healthcare (someone has to take care of aging baby boomers). There’s only so much you can do to push people toward manufacturing — it’s not a thriving sector, many of the higher-tech plants don’t need that many people, and if you manage to reshore, say, t-shirt factories, those are going to be difficult jobs to fill and cause a big spike in prices.

“If you jack up tariffs high enough, you’ll bring manufacturing production back, but it’s a really costly way of doing it, because you’re taxing consumers to make that happen,” Hanson says.

The administration’s policies are already driving up prices on some goods, including coffee, beef, apparel, and energy. Some companies, such as automakers, have eaten the costs so far, but many economists say that as time goes on, they’ll pass on the pressure in the form of higher prices.

To be sure, it’s not just Trump whose priorities conflict with one another. It’s the American people. While Americans’ concerns about immigration are declining, it’s one of the reasons the president was elected. Polls show voters agree with the idea of bringing back manufacturing, even if they don’t want the jobs themselves. They’re also worried about increased prices. The jumble means the public’s views are misaligned, too.

In a statement to Business Insider, White House spokesperson Kush Desai disputed the premise of a trilemma. “In the two decades after World War II, American industry and working-class living standards blossomed despite relatively low rates of immigration. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan similarly used tariffs over the past few decades to develop their manufacturing bases and massively raise living standards — all without letting tens of millions of unvetted migrants pour over their borders. President Trump’s America First agenda has tamed inflation, sealed our border, and secured trillions in historic investment commitments to lay the groundwork for a resurgence of American Greatness,” he said.

At the end of the day, there are people making these decisions, and there’s been a huge erosion of trust.

When I ran the statement by Lincicome, from Cato, he told me it read like a “hilarious non sequitur” and said it was like comparing apples to oranges. In the two decades after World War II, the US saw a huge increase in its native-born working-age population, with soldiers coming home, women going to work, and the baby boom, and much of the rest of the world “was in shambles” after the war. Now, we have the opposite. “This is simply not the baby boom,” he said. He added that many economists would “love a streamlined and more open legal immigration process.”

I reached out to Lovely, too, who said via email that the countries the White House named that have used tariffs in the past “were at much lower levels of development than the US at the time of their rapid growth phase (and far from the productivity frontier).” None used tariffs as a major policy instrument, and “it is difficult to see how their growth experiences, in such different contexts (China in particular) make much sense as a model for the American economy today.”

The White House’s specific policies aside, the overall uncertainty emanating from the Oval Office has many businesses on edge. The president is attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve. Under his watch, the US government has taken positions in Intel and US Steel and halted production on a nearly finished offshore wind project. It’s the kind of stuff that makes the rest of the world look at the US and think … hoo boy.

“Companies around the world might be looking at the US and wondering if this is really the environment to invest in at this point in time,” says Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

In an ideal world, there would be a boom in job growth, in manufacturing and otherwise, that disproportionately benefited American workers. And it would happen while prices stayed low and inflation remained at bay. But that’s not the world we live in. The White House’s approach to trade and immigration risks pushing up prices. Businesses, consumers, and workers are on edge, and it feels impossible to guess what’s next. The harder the president pushes on any one side of his triad of goals, the other two start to give.

“At the end of the day, there are people making these decisions, and there’s been a huge erosion of trust,” Caldwell says. “Generally speaking, people don’t like to do business with those that they don’t trust.”

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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