Professor Iwan J. Azis is very interested in how President Donald Trump’s trade policy impacts the American Midwest. Since the lead-up to the 2016 election, Trump has bombarded Americans (and people all over the world, really) with his “America first” initiative, an isolationist approach to global trade that uses massive incentives to entice overseas manufacturers to set up shop in the United States. One of the most visible outcomes of America first is a planned plant for Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Subsidized by billions in tax incentives, the facility was supposed to make LCD screens from start to finish, but right now, the screens have to be shipped to a factory in Mexico to be finished off. A recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek called Wisconsin’s agreement with Foxconn “disastrous.”
To learn more about America first on-the-ground, Azis, who is a CRP Visiting Lecturer and an AEM Adjunct Professor, visited Mount Pleasant over February break (Full disclosure: I’m in Intro to Methods of Planning Analysis, the class Prof. Azis teaches in CRP, and he seemed very enthusiastic about this trip). After returning to Ithaca, Prof. Azis gave an interview on U.S. trade policy to Development + Cooperation (D+C), a German publication that focuses on global development.
In that conversation, Azis gives readers his take on the U.S.’ tariff war with China, Trump’s issues with the World Trade Organization, and more. A link to the interview in English and in German can be found here and here.