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Friend,
I am excited to share that this week my bipartisan, bicameral legislation, the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Trade Crimes Act, passed the House! This bill was sponsored by both the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Select Committee on China and passed through the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support earlier this fall.
For decades, Communist China and its subsidiaries frequently – and purposefully – have violated U.S. trade laws through tariff evasion, transshipment, forced labor, and other trade crimes.
This is a deliberate attempt to take advantage of American workers and businesses – in turn lowering wages, forcing American manufacturers to close their doors, and gutting rural manufacturing towns. The passage of my bill is a meaningful step toward ensuring the CCP is held accountable for their continued illicit trade activity.
Recently, the Select Committee on China uncovered trade fraud committed by Chinese auto manufacturer, Qingdao Sunsong. The company was using transshipment to evade U.S. tariffs, forcing an Illinois company to lay off a quarter of their workforce. This is far from the only Chinese company taking action to exploit our trade system to bolster China’s non-market economy, crippling American industry and manufacturing, threatening workers’ wages and livelihoods, and enabling slave labor.
Despite the high volume of trade crime-related cases, the DOJ has under-resourced its prosecution efforts. While tariffs are one tool in our toolkit to level the playing field, we also must enforce our trade laws and hold China accountable for repeated violations that have a catastrophic impact on American workers and industry.
This bill will combat these crimes by ensuring President Trump’s Department of Justice has the ability to detect and prosecute these trade crimes. Specifically, this bill:
- Establishes a new task force or similar initiative within the DOJ’s Criminal Division to investigate and prosecute trade-related crimes.
- Enhances nationwide responses to trade-related offenses by providing training and technical assistance to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, expanding investigations and prosecutions, and allowing for parallel criminal and civil enforcement actions.
- Requires the Attorney General to submit an annual report to Congress assessing the DOJ’s efforts, statistics on trade-related crimes, and fund utilization.
- Communist China does not play by the rules, they do not follow the law, they will not stick to international norms. While China enjoys most favored nation trade status, they are simultaneously violating the trade laws and undermining American workers and our economy.
We must take steps to end that imbalance, and I look forward to working with President Trump to do so.
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