Billy Perrigo
Announcing his tariffs in the White House Rose Garden last week, President Trump said the move would help reopen shuttered car factories in Michigan and bring various other jobs back to the U.S.
“The president wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in the United States of America,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added on Tuesday. “He wants them to come back home.”
But rather than enticing companies to create new jobs in the U.S., economists say, the new tariffs—bolstered by recent advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics—could instead increase incentives for companies to automate human labor entirely.
“There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that this is going to bring back a lot of jobs,” says Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist and professor of AI & work at Oxford University. “Costs are higher in the United States. That means there’s an even stronger economic incentive to find ways of automating even more tasks.”
In other words: when labor costs are low—like they are in Vietnam—it’s usually not worth it for companies to invest in the expensive up-front costs of automating human labor. But if companies are forced to move their labor to more expensive countries, like the U.S., that cost-benefit calculation changes drastically.
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