This is only going to continue. A strong and prosperous Mexico is a strategic win for the United States in a lot of different ways
Good, much better than buying shit directly from China either way - shorter supply loop, hybrid Mexican/Chinese expertise & quality control, this is why we want international relations really.
Over the years I’ve never really been disappointed with a made in Mexico part.
Only glass bottled sodas with real sugar I can find on the market, too. And their produce quality? My goodness.
How?
If some Americans I disagree with want fewer immigrants coming here, then a more stable Mexico would encourage Mexicans and other Spanish speaking immigrants to stay in Mexico. Mexicans wouldn’t immigrate to the USA, and Guatemalans and so on would stop at stable and prosperous Mexico rather than making the further journey to the culturally estranged USA. Instead of building the wall, we’d make Mexico a net.
“Despite working long hours doing many times strenuous and dangerous work, maquila workers earn only 50 cents to 1 dollar per hour.”
Current minimum wage is closer to 2 dollars an hour, still a long way to go but that’s not considering benefits and pretty much all transportation and two meals a day are taken care of (in the city where I work).
It sucks but it’s much better than outside the maquiladora market.
In fact the article you posted in more ways than that, I guess it’s not updated since a long time ago but since always extra time has been paid at double the rate for the first 9 hours and triple rate for the next ones (maximum of 12 hours per week).
Thanks for the additional info. Sorry - that article I posted was not very well researched - I should have looked for something better, but was just making a point that inequity is still a big problem in a “prosperous” Mexico.
I appreciate you also confirming that working conditions in maquiladoras are accountable to some decent standards, and that they provide additional benefits - overtime pay rates being one of them, which is encouraging to hear - I wonder if that was due to labor unions or not.
Clearly, they are better places to work than many other local options. So for sure, not everything about maquiladoras is negative - and they are certainly not the root cause of disparity in North America. Thanks again for correcting the perception I might have given with that article.
Yeah, unions in mexico advanced legislation a lot in the last century, although legislation had become stagnant when the right wing party was in power for 12 years
Covid showed that supply chains halfway across the world are a problem when there is a big disaster and a stronger Mexico could be a good partner for US immigration concerns. China having less influence is the cherry on top for em.
We had been saying that since the dawn of fucking time but here we are “Covid showed”
Logistics my man. It’s easier and cheaper to walk down the street to get some milk than it is to get in your car, burn gas, drive for several miles, pick up the milk, then drive back. Mexico doing well is as good as Canada doing well. Strong neighbors are our biggest advantage.
While this is true, over seas shipment is actually incredibly cheap and efficient. I’m sure Mexico also has great shipping lanes to but cheap overseas shipping is why fruit is packed in countries 1000s of miles apart from where it is grown.
Sir we’re turning cargo ships back into ones that use sails instead of engines due to the extremely high cost of using diesel as well as the apocalyptic climate cost. We can ship shit from Mexico to us using semitrucks. Land. That’s so much more cost efficient I struggle to put it into words.
Trains. Just use trains. Easy to ship large shipments, easy to electrify.
semitrucks
trains too. they’re trying to improve the eagle pass area (much in the news, thanks to dipshit abbott) https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/new-u-s-mexico-trade-corridor-eyed/
Semitrucks are some of the least efficient vehicles we have. They burn like 15x the amount of fuel to bring a container 1 mile compared to a cargo ship. They’re also one of the harder vehicles to electrify as we decarbonize. In general, boats are more efficient than trains which are more efficient than trucks, and by a lot. Also, much of the US’ imports from Mexico arrive by sea because northern Mexico is very mountainous and rural. Other than factories built along the US border, it’s impractical to ship over land.
They burn like 15x the amount of fuel to bring a container 1 mile compared to a cargo ship.
First, source? Second, when the cargo ship is also going over 15x the distance, it’d better be effective at longer ranges. Third, trucking is how you get cargo containers from the dock to where it needs to go. Expanding on that existing system and scrapping some of the cargo ships that are already overutilized just seems like it would be better for everyone. Faster, cheaper, strategic. And even if we do still have to ship by sea, the distance goes from fucking China to neighbor.
I never said that trucks don’t serve a purpose, they’re just really inefficient for long-distance transportation. If we’re maximizing for fuel efficiency, cargo is shipped to the nearest port to its destination, loaded on a train if the destination is further inland, and then a truck takes it the last mile to its destination.
Regarding a source look at the table under “US freight transport” on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
Removed by mod
You ever smorf your lurf into a dimbledick you idiot fuck? Didn’t think so.
It is unquestionably better for the environment to use a more sustainable form of transit but the above comment I was replying to spoke mainly about logistics something that our routes with China have mastered and not that we can’t do the same or better with Mexico.
The comment you replied to being mine which explained it’s easier and cheaper to get something from a neighbor than the literal other side of the world. Correct. I believe your position was the opposite of that statement.
You are correct if they use trains however more than likely they will use traditional transport trucks which when accounted for the cost of each item is actually more expensive than shipping by barge of course this is offset if the point is far from a coast or shipping yard because then they would use traditional transport shipping as well.
I guess the point I made inproperly was that it’s more complicated than saying it’s closer so it’s better
Right on. Send Seal Team 7 up here to shoot trudeau.
The more robust legitimate economy Mexico builds for itself the less power the cartels have.
This is wonderful news for everyone involved except China
This is wonderful news for everyone that matters.
Who doesn’t matter?
James Corden
Technically, Chinese Companies are heavily invested in Mexico as a tariff bypass.
Jokes on them, Mexico is just selling shit they bought from China.
Mexico supplies us with a ton of produce. They have a great climate for growing year-round
No way. They import electronics from the place that sells cheap electronics?!
No but honestly Mexico being our produce supplier and then using that money to get better electronics to make more food sounds like such a big win for us even if it mildly benefits China.
Funny how US imports go down just as Mexico’s go up. Almost like there might be a strategy to global economics.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports-from-china
Funny how US imports go down just as Mexico’s go up.
You’ve linked two different graphs with timescales that don’t match. If you zoom out the timescales, you can see US Chinese imports vary considerably throughout the year but are roughly level over 10 years. Meanwhile Mexico’s Chinese imports have been on a predictable upward trajectory for over 20 years.
And neither of these independent variables gives us any information at all about Chinese goods being imported into the US via Mexico. This is as bad as someone sending that “what happened in 1971” page as evidence for something.
Apologies, try this-
This kind of shit happens in Canada all the time. A Canadian makes the packaging, puts the Chinese made thing in it and slaps a “made in Canada” sticker on it.
Is this due to tariffs? We just import China stuff via Mexico so suppliers can avoid tariffs?
Joke’s* on them
Or just press the reader view button in Firefox’s address bar. Doesn’t work for every website, but it works on this one.
TIL everyone uses Firefox.
Serious question though… do most modern browsers have this option? I really only use Firefox so I’m not familiar with the others.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In the depths of the pandemic, as global supply chains buckled and the cost of shipping a container to China soared nearly twentyfold, Marco Villarreal spied an opportunity.
He found a client in Hisun, a Chinese producer of all-terrain vehicles, which hired Mr. Villarreal to establish a $152 million manufacturing site in Saltillo, an industrial hub in northern Mexico.
New data released on Wednesday showed that Mexico outpaced China to become America’s top source of official imports for the first time in 20 years — a significant shift that highlights how increased tensions between Washington and Beijing are altering trade flows.
American consumers and businesses turned to Mexico, Europe, South Korea, India, Canada and Vietnam for auto parts, shoes, toys and raw materials.
U.S. imports fell annually as Americans bought less crude oil and chemicals and fewer consumer goods, including cellphones, clothes, camping gear, toys and furniture.
Even as concerns about the coronavirus faded in 2022, the United States continued to import a lot of Chinese products, as bottlenecks at congested U.S. ports finally cleared and businesses restocked their warehouses.
The original article contains 1,430 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wow so according to the right, the rapists and terrorists are really good at manufacturing.
Wait… so Trump’s tariffs WORKED!? Heavy-handed though they may have been in the application, Biden has continued them so they seem to have the blessing of the current administration. Wow… historians are going to have a hard time trying to separate stuff that was “good” (even a stopped watch is right twice a day) from the prior administration vs. all the rest.
It’s great for Mexico though.
Trumps tariffs were intended to spark growth in domestic manufacturing, not Mexican manufacturing. Not to mention the fact that he also absolutely fucked over a huge portion of Midwest farmers with that choice also can’t possibly be seen as “good”.
There’s this thing known as inertia. If Biden were to reverse the Trump administration tariffs, China doesn’t have any reason to remove their tariffs on the US (which were made in response to Trumps tariffs) but would still benefit, especially with the huge rise of tensions between the US and China over Taiwan.
The only reason the tariffs are still in effect is that it wouldn’t do anything good for the US to repeal or to have repealed them, not because they were a good idea.
Thank you for the explanation.
China’s pandemic policies are what made US companies reconsider where labor had been outsourced. That work is now moving to India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico. Many were pissed China demanded halts to production. The capitalists want their product made when they want it. Going forward, that will not as often be out of China.
This is the correct answer. Manufacturing company higher ups lost their shit when the spice stopped flowing to save human life
They did work, to a point, but were also pretty hurtful to US economy. The company I worked for, which shall not be named, decided to move a sizable chunk of product manufacturing to Malaysia, and is (was?) considering Mexico as well, all because of the tariffs. This caused the stock to tank, and money was lost, but then, it proved pretty handy when covid hit.
I don’t like Trump, and I didn’t like the way tariffs were implemented, but I strongly agree the US needs to be less dependent on China. Tariff did the job somewhat, so I guess it wasn’t a completely wrong decision.
… Tariffs DISCOURAGE foreign trade. So no, this worked IN SPITE of Trumps’ removed tarrifs.
The tarrifs were (and are) applied to China. Mexico, a signatory to USMCA, does not experience them.
