Remember the MADE IN HONG KONG label?

México is being accused by presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his many surrogates and millions of followers especially those from the blue collar class of being responsible for stealing American  jobs by offering greedy Yankee entrepreneurs lots of very cheap labor.

Yet, in the past, exactly the same phenomena took place, but the culprit was not Mexico, it was the then British colony of Hong Kong. Tons galore of toys, cheap fashion clothing, electronic goods just to name a few sold in the USA had the “Made in Hong Kong” label, yet nobody in the USA complained, not even Donald Trump himself. Why? Because it was very good for the American consumer, that’s why. However, there are very important differences between the goods manufactured in Hong Kong and sent to the USA, and the goods assembled in Mexico with US manufactured parts and raw materials. Under the maquiladora or twin plant concept, US factories supplied everything creating in the process lots of American jobs, the only thing done in Mexico was manufacturing assembly, and in most cases the finished product had to be assembled in the USA itself. An example of this was RCA Corporation in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. RCA, with its slogan “the most trusted name in electronics”, began manufacturing in Ciudad Juárez deflection yoke coils and flyback transformers that, once finished, were sent back to the USA for final assembly at the RCA Bloomington plant in Indiana into the finished product, black and white TV sets and color TV sets. The RCA TV sets thus had the label “Made in the USA”. It might be added that these TV sets based on old technology met their demise when they became obsolete and were replaced by the much more efficient flat panel display LED and LCD tv sets which no longer require the bulky and hard to manufacture yokes and flyback transformers.

When goods were manufactured inside the USA using subassemblies supplied (manufactured) from other countries, the term used was (and still is) outsourcing, and eventually came the claim by US policitians and labor unions that this mode of doing business was tantamount to exporting jobs from the USA overseas. Clearly, under the maquiladora concept used in Mexico, since all the parts used by the US twin plants in Mexico had to come from the USA (or perhaps some country like Hong Kong) and not a single nail fastener or screw manufactured in Mexico could be added to the finished product, it stands to reason that the really good manufacturing jobs that involved procedures such as tool and die making -where the good paying jobs truly are- remained in the USA. The only component added at the maquiladoras in Mexico was inexpensive labor without which US manufacturers such as RCA Corporation would have been unable to compete with other countries such as highly technologically developed Japan that had easy access to lots of cheap labor in neighboring countries such as Thailand and the Philippines. The truth of the matter is that, without the help of their maquiladoras in Mexico, many US corporations would have been unable to compete with their products not only outside the USA but also inside the USA, especially with very cheap products having the “Made in Hong Kong” label.

Those like Donald Trump who blast Mexico for “stealing away American jobs” also ignore another important issue. Since many if not most of the US maquiladoras are just at the other side of the fence along the US-Mexico border (the same fence that Donald Trump wants to replace with an impenetrable wall akin to the Great Wall of China), a lot of the money paid in salaries to Mexican workers returned to the USA by the simple fact of many Mexican workers looking for bargains in US cities like El Paso. Furthermore, many of the white collar Mexican workers (accountants, administrators, engineers, you name it) working at the US maquiladoras in Mexico made it a habit of opening up bank accounts in US banks where the convenience of being able to use checking accounts and credit cards in dollars to do some shopping or even to buy gasoline or go to the doctor on the US side was a magnet for a lot of the money these professionals earned in the US maquiladoras in Mexico. The maquiladoras became a boon to the economies of US cities all along the Mexican border.

In contrast, for many of the Donald Trump items sold in the USA but outsourced far away from the USA, not only does the Janus-faced Trump not create any jobs in the USA, but also adding insult to injury no US city has gotten any benefit from the Donald Trump outsourcing since, unlike Mexico which is just along the US southern border and the term “overseas” is way out of line, the places were he gets his cheap stuff are so far away from the USA that in practical terms not a single dollar spent in buying his goods ever comes back to the USA, those places are truly overseas to the full extent of the word.

Donald Trump relies on the fact that many of the millions who blindly follow him are uneducated blue collar workers with no college degrees, and will swallow up all his lies without actually considering the facts.

As a British colony, Hong Kong became a thing of the past when it was returned by the Britons to China in 1997. The Chinese government got smart, and learning from the economic prosperity lessons acquired by the Chinese who made their living in Hong Kong, accelerated its withdrawal from the hard line marxist-leninist economic model, adapting it towards an economic model with a strong influence of modern day economics and free market capitalism. The move that had begun in 1992 ended up replacing the “Made in Hong Kong” label with the much more awsome and prevalent “Made in China” label we are now seeing in many of the goods now sold in the USA. And thus China is now in the verge of becoming -or perhaps it already is- the world’s first economic superpower, displacing the USA from the prominent role it had in the past as numero uno.

For all his stupid antics, Donald Trump has not been so dumb as to criticize products bearing the “Made in Mexico” label for, the truth of the matter, there are not that many products sold in the USA bearing such a label. In order to compete against the rest of the world, especially the Chinese, it stands to reason that American managers, entrepreneurs and investors need all the help they can get from their parent companies in Mexico in order to keep costs low and remain competitive while at the same time holding on to the “Made in the USA” label, a marketing label which outside the USA all the way around the world appears to be following the same footsteps of extinction left by the dinosaurs that roamed the globe more than sixty million years ago. And it all started with the “Made in Hong Kong” label.